1. Rawls the hedgehog, Shklar the fox — Shklar’s inversions; 2. History shapes our conceptual resources — Traditions of commentary — Political praxis over political theoria; 3. Versatile stories, different angles — Jeffersonian education, Jacksonian fairness — Political rights without natural rights?; 4. Tradition as mythology — Heroes with warts; 5. Madison: democracy as political grind — Hamilton: democracy as fact hungry; 6. Jefferson: democracy as self-government — Adams: democracy as dangerously self-destructive — Our two aboriginal forces: hope and evil
1. With John Rawls, Judith Shklar will be recognized as one of the two most important politico-moral philosophers of the last half of the 20th century. [1] In 1971, Rawls published the definitive statement of liberal political philosophy in A Theory of Justice, and it not only revitalized the then widely recognized defunct discipline of political theory, but has defined its problems up to the present. Rawls the hedgehog spent the rest of his career restating, reshaping, and extending that powerful, central vision. Shklar the fox, however, while working in the adjacent department to Rawls at Harvard, left behind a fascinatingly variegated corpus of work behind. The most important to posterity, it seems to me, will be Ordinary Vices (1984) and The Faces of Injustice (1990). The latter inverts the traditional role of the political philosopher, fulfilled most grandly by Rawls, thus opening up a vast new space to be filled by theorists: instead of putting justice at the center of a systematic theory, she puts injustice, and she attempts to show how doing so requires us to reprioritize our conceptual resources.
Even more interesting, perhaps though, is the intellectual context in which Ordinary Vices appears. The traditional mode of political thought that puts justice at the center is also largely a Kantian enterprise (to which Rawls did much to give historical shape to). Rawls’s big enemy in Theory was the then-dominant tradition of politico-moral philosophy, utilitarianism. Utilitarianism and Kantianism had been the two overwhelmingly dominant traditions of thinking for nearly two centuries. No sooner had Rawls’ book appeared, however, then did a revival of Aristotelian-edged virtue ethics appear on the scene, rejecting the seesaw between means-end utility and deontological principle. Virtue ethics has been the most fertile tradition, it seems to me, in pure moral philosophy—but no sooner did it get its spurs, then did Shklar invert its paradigm. Reviving Montaigne’s inversion of Renaissance virtue ethics (which was before Kant and Bentham had blotted out virtue-oriented ethical systems like Shaftesbury and Mandeville [2]), Shklar makes an interesting case for placing vice at the center of one’s philosophy if one is committed to liberal democracy.
2. Central to both Rawls and Shklar’s work was an understanding of the historical line of thinkers that give shape to our conceptual resources. [3] Most of Rawls’ work on history was relegated to his lectures on political and moral philosophy that he gave at Harvard, and that have thankfully been published. Shklar wrote important studies on Rousseau, Hegel, and Montesquieu, in addition to a whole series of essays on individual thinkers (most collected in her posthumous Political Thinkers and Political Thought (1998)). And part of Rawls and Shklar’s enduring importance will be because of the students they spread into the world, most of whom take very seriously indeed our intellectual inheritance. [4]
Shklar’s life was cut tragically short, and among the work she left unfinished was a bit of writing on the specifically American political intellectual tradition, which has been published as Redeeming American Political Thought (1998). As Dennis Thompson, one of her former students who writes the forward to the collection, reports, Shklar taught the subject many times, but resisted writing a book on it because, she once said, “the subject is too hard” (vii). Thompson cogently notes the irony of this from someone who’d mastered Hegel (let alone everything else she’d written on). But reading her efforts to wrangle American political theory into an explanatory pattern, one begins to not only understand why she thought so, but believe her. Thompson suggests that “the difficulty lay not in the theorists themselves but in the interpretations that commentators had laid upon them” (vii). However, Shklar was never much of a polemical writer, preferring the mode in which the coherence and power of one’s own vision sustained interest, rather than a self-conscious situating in the current conversational milieu. [5] Lack of polemic characterizes these essays as much as elsewhere, which leads me to think that the difficulty didn’t lie in scraping off (sometimes deeply embedded) traditions of commentary.
Implicit in her approach is an attempt to balance numerous conditions and factors in eliciting American political thought. Above all, it seems that what makes American political thought difficult is that its founders were also the founders of American political practice. And this is significantly different than our European traditions. Whatever the brilliance of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, or Hegel, they didn’t create a constitution and run for president. The fact that Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton created American political praxis didn’t itself make American political thought unique, and in fact Shklar looked somewhat suspiciously, as Thompson points out, at theses about American exceptionalism. After all, other countries have now tried democracy in various forms and have obviously had their own creators of political praxis that have touched off conversations about its functioning. But the flipside to exceptionalism is parochialism, and that has been an accusation about American political theory and Shklar does find it annoying. (See the beginning of “The American Idea of Aristocracy.”) Between exceptionalism and parochialism are the complex relationships Shklar tried to chart between an abstract, theoretical conversation and the historical practices it was intimately bound up with. It was this binding that seemed much more in force than in Europe. Implicit, I think, in Shklar’s book is a thesis about American political thought being itself implicitly an assertion of pragmatism’s inversion of the Platonic priority of theoria to praxis.
3. One of the unique features of the book is that it tells what is essentially the same story over and over, from different angles. For some this might be annoying, and if she’d gotten the chance to get this work to press, I’m certain Shklar would’ve eliminated the repetition. But angular overlap, done right, is a strength of the essay as a genre. In fact, it seems a stylistic parallel to James’s pragmatist idea, in “What Pragmatism Means,” that thoughts are instruments and beliefs habits. And the trick about instruments and habits is that you apply them over and over in new, technically unique situations. That’s how you know it is a good instrument or habit—for if it broke down, you’d get a new instrument or habit. Likewise for developmental stories—the more versatile the story, the better equipped it is to explain phenomena, the more likely it is that that story touches on something real and operative.
Shklar’s story moves through three basic stages: the Revolutionary Era that establishes the basic pattern of American political thought; the second generation of antebellum Jacksonian democrats that heroically failed to face the moral problem of slavery; and the post-war rise of the social sciences. The focus of most of the essays is on the first two stages, and hardly move out of the 19th century. The book is split into two, with the first on individual (or grouped) thinkers (like “Alexander Hamilton and the Language of Political Science” or “An Education for America: Tocqueville, Hawthorne, Emerson”) and the second on specific topics (like “The Boundaries of Democracy” or “Democratic Customs”). The first section is more polished and overlaps less than the second because most of the second half of the book is the unpublished material. However, the second half contextualizes the first—it’s the larger story that the individual thinkers move in. For example, “An Education for America” begins, “Do we really know what sort of schooling is most likely to make students into good citizens? ... How does American democracy educate its citizens or help them to educate themselves?” (65) It wasn’t until the second section that I understood how the chapter was implicitly answering a Jeffersonian question that Shklar felt attuned to. For “Jefferson promoted a plan for what he called a ‘natural aristocracy’ through a system of education,” effectively “replacing politics with education” (“The American Idea of Aristocracy,” 150). The Jacksonians, despite using “aristocrat” as a term of political damnation, carried the mantle of Jefferson, because for them “education was looked at entirely as an aspect of citizenship” (“Democracy and the Past: Jefferson and His Heirs,” 183). Indeed, it is during the Jacksonian period that the moral point of view of democracy becomes explicit, if looked at and defended differently by our founding traditions of political thought. For when Shklar says in “Democratic Customs” that “voting and education are marks of dignity, not means to other ends,” she’s invoking a very unpragmatic rhetoric, and quite purposefully I take it. She says that for the Jacksonians, “it was ‘special’ privilege and ‘idle’ wealth, not their very existence, that aroused their sense of injustice. It was a struggle for recognition for them, the right to a dignified status as workers and citizens” (193). This polemically moral vision, she says in her presidential address to the American Political Science Association, “Redeeming American Political Theory,” expresses itself as “fairness [being] the very essence of their notion of justice” (99).
“Justice as fairness” is the (very famous) slogan that was the centerpiece of Rawls’s politico-moral philosophy. [6] Its appearance shows how Shklar viewed Rawls’ contribution to the larger frame she generates. But it unfolds legally in American political practice, which she takes to be distinctive. She notes that Tocqueville had already noticed that “all political problems in the United States become legal problems” and says, “since all our rights are inscribed in the Constitution, every citizen can and must claim his or her rights before the judiciary. American political culture is radically legalistic and focused on the courts” (112). If you take a class on human rights, they will find it important to distinguish between natural rights and political rights. Shklar’s point suggests that American political practice makes the notion of “natural rights” moot in working out justice in the American system. This strikes me as another important site for work to be done, for does it mean that we can just do away with the notion of natural human rights? Or does the presumed existence of natural rights motivate the debate about political rights? Can we chuck the metaphysics and just subsist on our “human rights culture,” which Rorty commended, or do we need the rhetoric of “natural” in some more robust form? [7] And is “justice as fairness” an inherently legalistic doctrine, or a moral conception of some kind? Since Rawls tried making a distinction between moral conceptions and the neutrality toward moral conceptions of his theory of justice, the last has seemed a pressing question in trying to understand liberal notions of tolerance. Shklar helps remind us what it means for these ideas to be embodied and acted upon, however we end up botanizing them.
4. Shklar says of John Adams that he sometimes took history to be “a source of mythology” (189). There is something of the mythological, I think, in all forms of tradition—the live workings of the past in the present made self-conscious. The primary reason intellectuals like Shklar dig so deeply into the past is to make us aware of the roots that are providing our nourishment—and so that we can then make an informed decision about whether it is really nutrients we are getting, or rather poison, thus precipitating a self-conscious choice in what traditions we continue to perpetuate.
One thing that commends Shklar’s political intellectual mythology over others is that it is a polytheistic pantheon, not a unified whitewashing of differences. One thing our cultured despisers of the American democratic experiment have too easily gotten off on is the exposing of the warts on the Founding Fathers. Politically and culturally motivated historians through the 19th century are indeed guilty of promoting halos in their pictures through overexposure, which tends to also blot out many defining details. Perhaps American political culture was still too overinfluenced by the divine right tradition of aristocracy, which didn’t like its blemishes noticed and punished those who did. (A culture influenced, I suspect, by the Christian traditions of impiety and blasphemy.) But can we not have heroes, then? Do all pictures of heroes suffer from a whitewashing that is, on this account, a necessary byproduct of the hero-making process? Shklar would think this nonsense. If we had a more Greek mode of tracing our traditions, then we needn’t worry about manipulating the past. [8]
Shklar very resourcefully turns Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton into an in-fighting clan of begetters who disseminated active elements in our current political makeup, both good and bad—or rather, ineffectual when pure and by themselves, but generative when together and conflicting. “Redeeming American Political Theory” might have been the prospectus for the book she didn’t have a chance to write, and it is there she pulls together three of these threads, saying Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton founded “three political sciences in America”: “Jefferson’s was speculative and physiological. Madison’s was institutional and historical, and Hamilton’s was empirical and behavioral. None were perfect, all were prophetic” (94).
5. Madison, who Shklar talks the least of in these essays, “devised a profound theory of political rationality.” Madison is probably best known for Federalist #10, which suggests that we shouldn’t fear the ability for change to quickly sweep a democratic system because factionalism will produce a tug-of-war grinding reform to a creeping minimum. As Shklar says, Madison had a “deeply functional view of democracy.” What attracts Shklar, however, is the bit that we rarely notice—how the experience of this political grind will affect the individual political agent. Madison thought that individual agents will “learn to appreciate the necessity of limiting their interests in response to the rights of other. ... The individual political agent learns to adapt and is forced to become more public-spirited as he accepts and follows the procedures that institutions compel him to follow” (96-7).
Hamilton responded to the “radical democratization of political theory” implied by the Revolution by seeing that “how to assess the behavior and attitudes of the anonymous many who compose the electorate was a wholly novel intellectual task.” What Hamilton set in motion was the assessment of the “tortuous and long road from the individual voter to the public policies of the federal government” (4). Hamilton was no particular fan of democracy—he was the Founder, you’ll recall, who wanted to import a king—and didn’t have a very high opinion of the voters, but he understood that “the modern state ... depended on information.” As Shklar says, “constitutional democracy is inherently a fact hungry political system, in which both those who govern and those who are governed yearn for solid information” (98).
6. If Madison’s political sociology of interest groups and Hamilton’s political science of electoral politics seem the most of interest to a tough-minded political science, Shklar’s tender-minded spirit is most interested in the star-crossed friendship between Jefferson and Adams. The speculative element in Jefferson is what makes him the most admired by Shklar of the four. Time and time again Shklar returns to Jefferson’s dream of “replacing politics with education,” an education that would produce what he calls a “natural aristocracy” (150). Preceding the Jacksonian fear of aristocracy was Adams’s belief that any inequality, separating the few from the many, would turn itself into an oppressive regime. Adams was Calvinistic in this way, being deeply pessimistic about the ability of humanity to side with virtue against corruption. Jefferson and Adams pair nicely with the twin founts of American Romanticism: Emerson and Hawthorne. Jefferson is optimistic in the same way that Emerson was that the American citizen was “capable of self-government” (150), i.e. autonomy, self-reliance. But Adams and Hawthorne were too oppressed by history and their own sense of the self-destructive psychology of the individual to share that optimism.
Thompson suggests that if Shklar’s heart was with Jefferson, then her head was with Adams. I can accept this formula, and it captures quite well how we need to balance these two aboriginal forces in the American spirit: hope and evil. If you hope with your head, that’s when you end up with theological nonsense like the eschatological, providential future-perfect “this will happen—everything will end up for the best.” Likewise, no amount of intellectual evidence can tell you when to or not to hope—you either find it in your heart or not. Conversely, if you believe in the ultimate depravity of humankind with your heart, as Calvinism instructs and as Adams’s great-grandson, Henry Adams, seemed to find himself, then hope may prove impossible, turning a healthy skepticism into a paralyzing nihilism. [9] But understanding, in an intellectual way, that evil indefatigably exists in the world is a mode of tempering one’s optimism about outlook, keeping one tethered to the ground. Shklar’s heart was with Jefferson because she believed ultimately in the autonomy that education promised, and that is why Emerson, Hawthorne, and so many other pieces of literature appear in this and other of her books. Shklar did not believe, with Jefferson, that a natural aristocracy would or should arise, but as indicated by the title of “An Education for America: Tocqueville, Hawthorne, Emerson,” she took very seriously the idea that the democratic citizen had much to learn from books specifically, and their authors’ intellectual struggle with the experience of democracy.
Endnotes
[1] Important caveat: only partly due to ignorance, that assessment excludes (generally) all Marxist thinkers. This is because in part thinkers working in the Marxist tradition have (largely) excluded themselves from the conversation surrounding what liberal democracies should do, including the philosophical conversations to which Shklar and others were a part of. Anyone who holds that the “system” is irrevocably corrupt or faulty, and that the only thing to do is get a new system (what Bernard Yack calls the “longing for total revolution”), will inevitably fall back on the activity of diagnosis divorced from proposed action—there's nothing left to do, at that point, but endlessly point out how irredeemable everything is going on around you. And since I believe that Marxism in these forms will fade away because of their inutility, that is another reason why I don't feel bad for my relative ignorance or think it will mar my prediction about Rawls and Shklar. Some thinkers, though, like Foucault and Frank Lentricchia, who fall under this category are nevertheless quite useful. Habermas is so concerned with the functioning of liberal democracies that he hardly counts as being in the Marxist tradition. And there is one branch of what could be thought of as post-Marxist thought—in America known as “communitarianism”—that in the main combines with hope for democracy (even if it would quibble with the qualifier “liberal”). Of these, I suspect Michael Walzer, an important interlocutor of Shklar's and long-time editor of the, roughly, communitarian and thus non-Marxist, leftist rag Dissent magazine, will have the most enduring value.
[2] J. B. Schneewind, in The Invention of Autonomy (1998), tells the most complete story I’ve seen of moral philosophy from the end of the Renaissance and Reformation to Kant. His principle beginning point for modern moral philosophy is Montaigne, but on the revival of virtue (which figured so importantly to, for example, Machiavelli) see Ch. 14, on the now-neglected figures of James Harrington and Shaftesbury. (On Harrington’s importance to British and American political thought, see J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (1975).)
[3] The importance of this feature of their work should be entertained in the context of Anglophone philosophy’s general neglect of history. I would ultimately (and unsurprisingly) blame this on Plato. For some relevant finger-pointing on this score, one might see “What Happened to Political Philosophy?” and maybe also “On Literature’s Accidents.”
[4] It’s possible I’m more partial to Shklar’s students because, unlike the Kantian Rawls, they are more interested in literature and things American. I think the two most notable of Rawls’ students are Christine Korsgaard, who though an unrequited Kantian, has done much to help the general thinking-through of the conceptual requirements of normative autonomy that Kant and Hegel initiated (see, e.g., The Sources of Normativity (1996)), and Susan Neiman, whose Evil in Modern Thought (2002) is an exceptional non-epistemology centered story of modern philosophy and whose Moral Clarity (2008) is an important, nonspecialist book on liberal American moral problems. Foremost among Shklar’s students for me (exempting the unbelievably useful, though not well-enough known, work of the already mentioned Bernard Yack) is George Kateb, whose work on Emerson has been widely recognized by Americanists.
[5] In a number of disciplines, this is beginning to be frowned on as unscholarly, though really it’s a matter of instrumental self-analysis. Richard Rorty described this mode as “strong misreading,” though “misreading” might be misleading in this context. In a precursor piece to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity’s more famous use, Rorty describes his theft of Harold Bloom’s term this way: “The critic asks neither the author nor the text about their intentions but simply beats the text into a shape which will serve his own purpose. He does this by imposing a vocabulary ... on the text which may have nothing to do with any vocabulary used in the text or by its author, and seeing what happens” (“Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism” in Consequences of Pragmatism, 151). The key is the reversal of priority of the purposes for which the author wrote for instead the purposes of the reader. The scholar knows a lot about why an author wrote, but the only way to think with a figure from the past is to have purposes of your own. In Rorty’s more careful moments, he distinguishes this as a philosophical mode as opposed to a historical mode. (See his “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres” in Truth and Progress.) The trouble with this mode, barring the scholar’s anxiety of it being bullshit, is that anyone can try and be a strong misreader and simply read a text as one wants—there’s just no assurance at an audience who will care for it. So, to compensate for a lack of self-trust (or for the accurate assessment of limitation), a writer might try and engage his compatriots’ views on the subject in the discipline. But such limitation shouldn’t lead us to resent the strength of others. It is, in the end, a gamble, for as Emerson said, “we hope it is more than whim at last” (“Self-Reliance”).
[6] The slogan first appears as the title of the 1958 paper that eventually was transformed into the first chapter of A Theory of Justice. It appears prominently in his major revision of his stance, Political Liberalism (1993), and its the title of the final slim book (2001) that was to serve as both restatement and primer (edited by Erin Kelly, as Rawls fell ill before he could make final revisions and expansions).
[7] See “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality” in TP. Rorty took the term from Eduardo Rabossi. Shklar wrote twice on this issue, in Legalism: Law, Morals, and Political Trials (1964) and American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (1991). One of her students, Rogers M. Smith, wrote a massive book on the latter’s issue of citizenship in Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions on Citizenship in U.S. History (1997). (Given the nature of writing big books, Smith had been already working on the project when Shklar began her set of lectures that became her book, and the two talked over their work often before her death.)
[8] See Rorty’s related use of “polytheism” in “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism” in PCP.
[9] There is a “book review” of The Education of Henry Adams Shklar wrote in the collection, but it is somewhat out of place with the rest. For Henry Adams, as Thompson says, “nearly defeat[s] her effort to find something of value in every thinker” (xiii). She was not a big fan of his alienation and irony directed toward the democratic experiment.
Showing posts with label Hawthorne. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hawthorne. Show all posts
Friday, July 04, 2014
Friday, June 28, 2013
Emerson's Development
1. He who lives with continuity alone cannot be a poet — The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing — But in the third stage the great question begins to bore you — Searching for the inner dialectic; 2. Philosopher: one whose art of living is bound up with theory — Whicher on Emerson: acquiescence — The Principle of Compensation and the Principle of Self-Reliance; 3. The tragic lapse theory of Emerson’s inner life — How do you reconcile the inner turmoil with the outer production? — Lapsarian accounts: right about biography, wrong about philosophy; 4. The Principle of Mood — Emerson’s dualism between monism/dualism — Assertion is relative to the mood in when we make them; 5. Juxtaposing “The Poet” and “Experience” — Nature loves to hide — Dream delivers us to dream — Romanticism’s promise of power as a dream to be actualized; 6. Whicher and Mumford — Self-preservation and self-transformation — Transformation and resistance, continuity and change
1. Harold Bloom once said that “critics, in their secret hearts, love continuities, but he who lives with continuity alone cannot be a poet.” [1] One of the things Bloom meant about critics is that they are like metaphysicians, philosophers—these are the kinds of chaps who look for the meaning of things, for a reason why X happened and not Y. This is, pushed to the extreme, reduction which leads to monism. The things disappear beneath the meaning you’ve extracted, and do that enough times and you’ll be left with one thing—Meaning/Reason. (This is why logos is the enveloping term in Greek idealism.) [2]
A more practical version of this is the scholar’s dismay at the fox. As Isaiah Berlin reminded us, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” For Berlin, this was a distinction between those with “a single central vision, one system” and those “who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.” [3] Scholars like to connect things; they like to explain why X was written. And it is, honestly, much easier if the writer is a hedgehog, because then you can keep drawing connections back to the central thesis that you’ve sussed out on behalf of the writer. This becomes particularly important as a tool of efficiency if the writer in question wrote material over a long period of time—first book or last, juvenilia or marginalia, hey, wouldn’t you know: it says the same thing.
Life (sigh) is never like this, though it’s difficult to imagine why we’d want to spend so much of our time as scholars on such imagined repetition. But we do like order—we like it when a writer does things for reasons that form a pattern. We don’t like it when those reasons are boring. Why did John Grisham write The Firm? To make money? Yawn. Why did Harriet Beecher Stowe write Uncle Tom’s Cabin? To fight racism? Okay, that’s more interesting; I can work with that. Why did Heidegger turn away from Being and Time? Because he realized that the goal of metaphysics was to both do it and transcend it and so had to work out a way of realizing both his own ambitions for conceptual mastery and desires for mystical silence? Now we’re talking. We like people like J. M. Coetzee, who described this hoped-for hedgehogginess thus:
When we fail at coming up with a single ambition or vision that a writer adheres to, we like just as much the challenge of showing how a writer unfolds via an inner dialectic. “Ralph was bored so he asked himself a different question” isn’t good enough—doesn’t really seem to merit attention (by itself). But how Richard Rorty’s first famous article, “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories” (1965), displays the central conceptual move that leads to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and from there to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, but equally that that first article is not Rorty’s answer to the mind-body problem, nor is Mirror Rorty’s final answer about philosophy—that is interesting. It takes time to show, and to show it is to shed new and needed light on what Rorty was really doing.
2. This search for an inner dialectic works quite well when approaching the central American Romantics, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. It’s easy to tell a “death of the imagination” narrative with Hawthorne and a “retreat to private expression” narrative with Melville. Emerson’s tale of development was established definitively by Stephen Whicher. Whicher’s Freedom and Fate (1953) is the beginning point for any serious scholarly work on Emerson, [7] and especially any work on Emerson as a philosopher. For Whicher’s book is about Emerson’s “inner life,” and Emerson’s inner life was taken up by the obsession with intellectual problems. Whicher shows how Emerson is a philosopher in Alexander Nehamas’s sense, someone whose art of living is bound up with the propounding of theoretical theses. [8]
Whicher’s central story is one of “acquiescence” (xvi). The general gist goes like this: Emerson’s first stage was the impress of the typical New England heritage of a Calvinistic belief in God’s Providence. However, do to the watering down of “the white-hot core of the original Calvinistic piety” (8) in Unitarianism, Emerson became susceptible to Humean doubt. This doubt laid waste to all the underpinnings of his faith in Providence, without actually touching the faith itself. This meant that natural, rational, and supernatural paths of justification were out for Emerson, but what saved him was the realization that God was within him—Emerson turns the original Protestant Reformation into a full-blown revolution. “The rock on which he thereafter based his life was the knowledge that the soul of man does not merely, as had long been taught, contain a spark or drop or breath of voice of God; it is God” (21).
So the first two stages of Emerson’s development, that take us to the resignation of his post in the Unitarian Church, give us the interaction of two fundamental principles to understand Emerson: 1) his faith in God’s Providence becomes Emerson’s Principle of Compensation which is then supplemented by 2) the God-within which becomes the Principle of Self-Reliance. The story that Whicher tells is that in the third stage the Principle of Self-Reliance expands into a kind of power madness, “that when Emerson found a basis for the assertion of unconditional good, in his discovery of the God within the soul, the law of compensation slipped into a subordinate place in his thoughts” (39). Finding God within gave Emerson the sense that all of our shackles were man-made, and thus paled in comparison to the power we had when we relied instead on God for support. Mad with his belief that he could do anything, Emerson’s Principle of Self-Reliance quite naturally collapses under its own weight, from the unbalanced ratio between claims-of-power and evidence-for-power. The more the world “remained obdurately independent of his will” (60), the more he saw that the Principle of Self-Reliance was clearly not all there was. So in the fifth and final stage, the Principle of Compensation returns in order to circumscribe the power announced by Self-Reliance. And so the promise of freedom Emerson felt with the discovery of the God within is diminished as he acquiesces to the encompassing demands of fate.
3. There is something very powerful and importantly right about Whicher’s narrative. However, there are two interlocked problems that should lead us to dissent from the conclusions Whicher draws about Emerson’s philosophical attitude. The first is the condensation of the proposed shift between all five stages at the very beginning of his career. The evidence Whicher accumulates doesn’t point at a steady development, but that the major movement of acquiescence has already occurred by Essays, First Series (1941). Nature (1836) is, without a doubt, a bewildering text that does not see Emerson at the height of his powers, but everyone affirms that all the action is in his first two books of essays. [9] How can his most powerful moments be an acquiescence?
Given that the evidence of the interplay between the Principle of Compensation and the Principle of Self-Reliance is present at minimum in seed form even at the beginning of his career as writer, it is equally easy to mark not a sharp break but a gradual unfolding of the essential elements of his mature thought. The difference between the two is that what Lawrence Buell calls Whicher’s “tragic lapse theory of Emerson’s inner life” [10] doesn’t do well in suggesting that Emerson has a coherent philosophy. In essence, Whicher explains away incoherence as biographically legible conflict that is, indeed, conceptually bunk. This treatment, of course, is given industrial strength justification by Emerson himself, his most famous line being “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (“Self-Reliance”).
So the second problem that leads from the first is that Whicher’s account doesn’t precisely help us read the final product. The reason is simple: there’s a reason that Emerson’s journals were raided for the final product of his polished essays and that things appeared as they did, and other things (from the journals) disappeared as they did. The question is what those local reasons were, something that would aid our ability to interpret how the essays hang together as they stand. We should not use the journals to explain away the need for us to think hard about what Emerson was meaning to do in the essays. Barbara Packer, in her book which we should see as an extension of Whicher’s account, summarizes the scholarly problem well in relation to Nature: the problem is in “finding a stylistically sensitive way of reconciling a diachronic account of the book’s genesis and growth with a synchronic account of its structure.” [11]
The main thesis I would forward is that Whicher-Packer lapsarian accounts are broadly right about Emerson’s biography, but wrong about his philosophy. I think such biographical sleuthing has been successful in establishing that Emerson’s initial, cosmically high hopes about the power that could be unleashed within each of us were tragically dashed—what I don’t think they’ve done as well in is in suggesting what Emerson did with that tragedy in constructing his philosophy. In particular, formulating the account as lapsarian gives us exactly the wrong handle on the heart of Emerson’s thought. Emerson may have thought in such biblical terms as the Fall of Man, and mythologized the paradox of having infinite power within while continuing to fail without in those terms, but the central strain of Emerson that faces the future breaks radically with these modes of thought, and so to interpret him according to them is to darken precisely what is most enlightening about him on our problems.
4. Whicher’s problem, I think, is that he doesn’t ascribe enough importance to what I shall call Emerson’s Principle of Mood. I think the hidden message of Emerson’s trajectory is not the fundamental importance of the struggle between the optimistic power of Self-Reliance against the pessimistic power of Fate (which has significant prima facie evidence in the trajectory to The Conduct of Life), but the struggle between the promise he felt in Self-Reliance and it’s ephemerality in the face of changing moods. The Principle of Compensation, which is always overinfluenced by Emerson’s faith in Providence (which is quite cheery), gives way to Mood as the most important element waging battle against Emerson’s optimism. It isn’t optimism vs. pessimism, but optimism vs. optimism/pessimism.
The conceptual source of Whicher’s rhetoric of acquiescence is his sense that Emerson is trying, and failing, to find a way to live in the Power of His Soul all the time. I think all of the following summarizing moments go wrong on precisely the point I’m addressing, and they mount in a steady progression (italics are all mine): “Though not quite ready himself to give up to the soul beyond the possibility of a quick self-recovery, the thought then central to his mind was of a new state of life, a state of greatness and freedom beyond anything in human experience, into which, if he could only hit upon the password, he and all men might at any moment enter” (48); “If freedom lay only in the total self-trust of greatness, and if in fact he could be great only in inceptions and not in act, how did his new faith free him?” (70); “Even if we drop the question of action, and seek on ‘Reality,’ the problem still remains, How is such wholeness to be won and kept?” (83-4); “But the radical defect of man, the creator in the finite, is his incapacity to maintain his creative force. ‘The only sin is limitation’—but this is original sin beyond the power of grace” (97); “Man is promised the world—a promise perpetually renewed and never kept” (111). You can tell Whicher’s account begins to lose explanatory power when he perversely construes Emerson’s exuberant redescription of sin as a lapsarian tragedy. He may, biographically, have been looking for a password and totality, but the philosophy we get in its finished form is not like this. Emerson’s tragic optimism lays precisely in his giving up of the desire for completeness—not as a lost hope, but as a dumb hope. (And this, to me, seems perfectly consistent with having to be reminded oneself about how dumb one’s hopes might be.)
I think we can find this sense of duality—between the elated promise of independence and the depressed realization of its fragmented nature—in his published work, from beginning to end. Less than a year after the publication of Nature, Emerson writes in his journal “A believer in Unity, a seer of Unity, I yet behold two.” [13] For Emerson, Unity is the essence of God and thus Self-Reliance’s promise of power, and thus duality is a fragmented deflation of that promise. What I think we find in Emerson’s writing is a dualism between monism/dualism—depending on mood, he sees the world through one lens, and then another.
The importance of the circumscription of mood is that it creates a radical positionality to the Emersonian utterance. And this is how we are to understand Emerson’s hobgoblin—for while it makes sense to say that you cannot hold both “there is a god” and “there is no god,” what sense does it make to say that you cannot be both happy and sad? Oh—at the same time, sure, but it certainly doesn’t make any sense to say that a person is being incoherent when they wake up in the morning happy and end the evening sad. Emerson’s radical thought is that our assertions about the world are equally relative to the mood we are in when we make them. And this then makes conceptual coherence a more complex affair to adjudicate the importance of. This means that to understand the most important syntactical unit in the Emersonian corpus—the sentence—you have to ascribe a mood, and that way mount a picture of coherence relative to the kinds of moods. The Principle of Mood is essentially the claim that it is rhetoric all the way down, that we are always contextually and rhetorically defined—but more, for it points the way toward a necessary expansion of our conceptual accounts to include the emotions, passions, temperament, attitude. So while the last half the 20th century has pretty much seen the rhetorical stance become common sense for the intellectuals, we still have Emerson sitting beyond.
5. On the surface, the necessity of understanding the text in context seems so obvious in terms of understanding anything as having one particular meaning as opposed to another that to invoke it to justify apparent contradiction looks suspiciously convenient (which is what many of Emerson’s contemporaries thought—Melville, for one). So I’d like to give one example that illustrates how Emerson uses this thought in a constructive mode. Emblematic of this general train of thought is the first two essays of Essays, Series Two: “The Poet” and “Experience.” These two essays cannot be read separately without giving a very misleading picture of Emerson’s vision. “The Poet” gives us a predictably up-beat picture—by this time, even to his contemporaries, Emerson was The Optimist. “The poet is the sayer, the namer … a sovereign, and stands on the centre.” “The Universe is the externization of the soul.” “Poets are thus liberating gods.” But in “Experience,” Emerson uses the death of his son, Waldo, to establish the much darker tone of the piece, offering this disturbing reaction:
6. Since Whicher supplies all the evidence needed to modulate his case, I think it’s easy to see the slant he puts on it as an unfortunate Mumfordism. While above I attempted to show what the conceptual source of the rhetoric of acquiescence was, it’s nearest historical source is Lewis Mumford’s groundbreaking and very influential The Golden Day (1926). With Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, and Waldo Frank, they composed the “Young American” critics, a group of wide-ranging intellectuals and cultural critics whose central philosophical preoccupation in the early 20th century was an attack on John Dewey and pragmatism for, essentially, not being radical enough. After Mumford’s chapter on the central American Romantics (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville), “The Golden Day,” follows his chapter on William Dean Howells, Twain, and William James, “The Pragmatic Acquiescence.”
Rather than confuting Mumford’s particular interpretation of pragmatism, I want to close by offering this more general observation about the conceptual resources of James and Dewey’s pragmatism. What I think Mumford and Whicher misunderstand about Emerson and the pragmatists is the importance of romantic self-transformation. They saw the essentially conservative character of “reality” and instrumentalism, but didn’t see how the Emersonian tradition was attempting to unlock a radically different orientation to a necessary recognition of the crossed axes of self-preservation and self-transformation. When Whicher sees Emerson try to assimilate the world’s resistance to the Poet’s Self-Reliance by his Principle of Compensation, he thinks Emerson has sold the pass to inevitability. In instrumentalism, we see how ends must first be fixed before deciding on what means or instruments one uses to carry out those ends, and thus how it doesn’t provide the opportunity to change those ends. But this understanding of Dewey’s instrumentalism completely ignores what Dewey tried to articulate in his notion of the means-ends continuum—that in the process of formulating a set of means to carry out a defined end we alter our sense of what end is desired, thus setting off a dialectic, as now new means are needed for the new end, the search for which will again alter the end-in-view, requiring new means, ad infinitum. [16] If we think of romanticism as the movement of thought that apotheosizes the transformative character of human power, we will see that while Mumford’s interpretation of pragmatism plays down the importance of romanticism in pragmatism in favor of Emerson and Whicher’s interpretation of Emerson plays down the importance of romanticism in Emerson in favor of pragmatism (unfortunately, on this view), and that what we really need is a view of Emerson and pragmatism that integrates their views of transformation and resistance, continuity and change, future and past into a coherent conceptual account. [17] It isn’t for them that we must do this, for it certainly may well turn out to be the case that we will have to reject some of their particular ways of understanding things—this is for us, for if Rorty is right, then figuring out how to get their conceptual projects to work is a way for us to understand how to get our conceptual projects to work.
Endnotes
[1] Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 78
[2] This is obviously a very particular understanding of what philosophy is, roughly romantic. For example, it’s the picture that is unveiled in my discussion of John Barth—see the third section of "On Literature's Accidents."
[3] From the beginning of “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” which can be found in Berlin’s Russian Thinkers or The Proper Study of Mankind.
[4] Quoted in Christopher Tayler’s “Tables and Chairs,” London Review of Books, March 21, 2013.
[5] This was the burden of Robert Brandom’s “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” in his Perspectives on Pragmatism. Rorty’s response was that Brandom’s paper gave him “a more flattering view of the course of my work than before. Brandom has suggested a coherence between my earlier and my later writings that had not occurred to me. I had not seen that there was a connection between the eliminative materialism I was urging in the 1960s and the private-public distinction I have been urging since Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. My unconscious has been more cunning than I had realized” (“Response to Brandom,” 190n4, in Rorty and His Critics).
[6] When you look at Hawthorne, you find a writer with a fairly stable vocabulary for tropes, an intense desire to make those tropes about troping, and an abiding concern about his ability to trope—so we can spot a trajectory wherein many of Hawthorne’s tales and sketches thematize the problem of writing within them, to his three vital novels—all in some manner internalizing the problem of writing, whether Hester’s needlework or Holgrave’s daguerreotyping or Coverdale the minor transcendental poet—to the final Marble Faun, all about death, representation, and the death of representation. Tack on Hawthorne’s inability to finish his final projects and you have a pretty good outline for a “death of the imagination” narrative. (If you want a display of what "thematizing the problem of writing" means, you might check out section 2 of "Work and Idleness.") When you look at Melville, you find a writer fascinated by the act of storytelling, but struggling to find his real voice as a writer. All his books through Moby-Dick are first-person narratives, and after encountering Hawthorne’s work and its literary-conceptual gymnastics, Melville writes his Great Book, publishes it, begins writing the next, and as the bad reviews of Moby-Dick come out, we can see him transforming Pierre into something that seems designed to fail (gloriously, for the book is brilliant). And The Confidence-Man—there’s no protagonist, no narrative! (On the surface, only, of course.) After that he gives up prose entirely for poetry, never publishing another story (Billy Budd was unfinished and posthumous) and writing the longest poem in English (barring, I believe, The Faerie Queene), nearly 18,000 lines, and some other short lyrics in the last 30+ years of his life. This story, reading his increasing impenetrability as a form of private expression, is the burden of Edgar Dryden’s Monumental Melville.
[7] Along with F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941), which obviously has a much larger scope. I hope to say something about Matthiessen’s book soon.
[8] See the “Introduction” to Nehamas’s The Art of Living. Nehamas makes a number of other distinctions in approaching theory and philosophy, all of which are pertinent to understanding Emerson. In particular, as Nehamas himself notes, the kind of philosopher his study is in large part about (Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault) are often called “literary” because central to their act of philosophy is the process of self-creation that happens in the written medium. Additionally, Nehamas’s exemplars “do not insist that their life is a model for the world at large. They do not want to be imitated, at least not directly. That is, they believe that those who want to imitate them must develop their own art of living, their own self, perhaps to exhibit it for others but not so that others imitate them directly. Imitation, in this context, is to become someone on one’s own; but the someone one becomes must be different from one’s model” (10). The relationship to the Emerson who said “imitation is suicide” (“The Poet”) and the Thoreau who said “I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account” (Walden, Ch. 1) should be obvious. However, Nehamas has never given any attention to the relationship (genealogical or otherwise) between Emerson and Nietzsche, though everyone who works on either is well aware of it. Nehamas’s story in that book is structured by the obsession his three later writers had with Socrates (and, hence, Plato). And given that two major heroes and influences on Emerson were Plato and Montaigne, there might be an interesting story to tell about the refraction of ideas through all these prisms of intellectual power and self-reliance.
[9] Considering Emerson’s Principle of Transition, that “power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition” (“Self-Reliance”), an argument could be made about the nature of Nature’s power being based on its slippery fluidity. That is, however, not an argument I intend on making, nor will I discuss the Principle of Transition. Nature is great fun, but Emerson’s acme is in the 1840s work.
[10] Buell, Emerson, 98
[11] Emerson’s Fall, 29
[12] The argument I would make about Emerson’s central line of thought—which is clearly well beyond the space afforded here, and beyond my present grasp anyway—is analogous to the arguments Hans Blumenberg and Bernard Yack mount against philosophers of history like Karl Löwith and Eric Voegelin. The latter two basically formulate narratives in which today’s modern, secular problems are simply the revenging of old, religious problems because our secular terms are simply written over the palimpsest of religion. (This is sometimes called the “secularization thesis,” and Löwith’s Meaning in History is paradigmatic.) By contrast, Blumenberg and Yack in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and The Longing for Total Revolution, respectively, attempt to show how some secular conceptual mechanics are genuinely new moves that produce new problems with no precursor in the older modes of thought. What I think is important in understanding Emerson are the reasons for his formulation of self-reliance as self-reliance, and not “God-reliance,” in Whicher’s very influential conflation (57). There’s no doubt in my mind that Emerson sincerely believed that God was within, and so that self-reliance was in some way God-reliance, but the conceptual work being done by his formulations of self-reliance were ultimately antithetical to belief in any and every form of God that is not found within—and this means that most forms of religion are behind the Emersonian curve. Furthermore, I think there’s a reason why his synonym for self-reliance in “Self-Reliance” is “self-trust” and not “self-faith” as well.
[13] May 26, 1837
[14] This is from the extraordinary close of Ch. 42 of Moby-Dick, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” I use it here as a placeholder for a larger discussion about the Melvillean and Emersonian strands of antirepresentationalism that I find pervasive in the central American Romantics. For in “Experience,” Emerson comes as close as he can get to the apocalyptic pessimism Melville displays in his mature work about the very possibility of representation, of there being any point to this pathetic negotiation we call “life.” Emerson articulates it—and somehow swerves back to optimism. I think of Melville and Emerson standing to each other as, in a manner, Derrida stands to Rorty. Rorty recognizes Derrida’s “arguments” as having an affinity to pragmatism’s antirepresentationlism, but equally that that rejection does not a pragmatist make. To make inroads on this angle, one should coordinate “The Whiteness of the Whale” with Derrida’s “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” (in his Margins of Philosophy). Compare Ishmael’s rhetorical question, “is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?” to Derrida’s thesis: “White mythology—metaphysics has erased within itself the fabulous scene that has produced it, the scene that nevertheless remains active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible design covered over in the palimpsest” (213).
[15] The Golden Day, 83 of the 1957 Beacon Paperback edition
[16] Brandom has reformulated Dewey’s notion of the means-ends continuum for Rorty’s notion of what Brandom calls the “vocabulary vocabulary”: “Every use of a vocabulary, every application of a concept in making a claim, both is answerable to norms implicit in communal practice—its public dimension, apart from which it cannot mean anything (though it can cause something)—and transforms those norms by its novelty—its private dimension, apart from which it does not formulate a belief, plan, or purpose worth expression” ("Vocabularies of Pragmatism," Perspectives on Pragmatism, 153). It's worth pointing out that here Brandom is attempting to assimilate some very specialized points in the philosophy of language with Rorty's taking up of the Mill-Berlin tradition of articulating a public/private distinction in order defend liberalism, but that given Emerson's own preoccupation with the distiction society and solitude, there might be some interesting resources in Emerson to think through this angle on pragmatism that Brandom has done so well in bringing to light. For a different application of Brandom's philosophy of language to the public/private distinction, see my "A Spatial Model of Belief Change."
[17] Despite the previous note, Brandom has rejected romanticism as an important genealogical root of pragmatism. See my discussion of this in “Pragmatism as Enlightened Romanticism.”
1. Harold Bloom once said that “critics, in their secret hearts, love continuities, but he who lives with continuity alone cannot be a poet.” [1] One of the things Bloom meant about critics is that they are like metaphysicians, philosophers—these are the kinds of chaps who look for the meaning of things, for a reason why X happened and not Y. This is, pushed to the extreme, reduction which leads to monism. The things disappear beneath the meaning you’ve extracted, and do that enough times and you’ll be left with one thing—Meaning/Reason. (This is why logos is the enveloping term in Greek idealism.) [2]
A more practical version of this is the scholar’s dismay at the fox. As Isaiah Berlin reminded us, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” For Berlin, this was a distinction between those with “a single central vision, one system” and those “who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.” [3] Scholars like to connect things; they like to explain why X was written. And it is, honestly, much easier if the writer is a hedgehog, because then you can keep drawing connections back to the central thesis that you’ve sussed out on behalf of the writer. This becomes particularly important as a tool of efficiency if the writer in question wrote material over a long period of time—first book or last, juvenilia or marginalia, hey, wouldn’t you know: it says the same thing.
Life (sigh) is never like this, though it’s difficult to imagine why we’d want to spend so much of our time as scholars on such imagined repetition. But we do like order—we like it when a writer does things for reasons that form a pattern. We don’t like it when those reasons are boring. Why did John Grisham write The Firm? To make money? Yawn. Why did Harriet Beecher Stowe write Uncle Tom’s Cabin? To fight racism? Okay, that’s more interesting; I can work with that. Why did Heidegger turn away from Being and Time? Because he realized that the goal of metaphysics was to both do it and transcend it and so had to work out a way of realizing both his own ambitions for conceptual mastery and desires for mystical silence? Now we’re talking. We like people like J. M. Coetzee, who described this hoped-for hedgehogginess thus:
One can think of a life in art, schematically, in two or perhaps three stages. In the first you find, or pose for yourself, a great question. In the second you labour away at answering it. And then, if you live long enough, you come to the third stage, when the aforesaid great question begins to bore you, and you need to look elsewhere. [4](The third stage, of course, is back to Yawnsville, but then I think that might be precisely the point.)
When we fail at coming up with a single ambition or vision that a writer adheres to, we like just as much the challenge of showing how a writer unfolds via an inner dialectic. “Ralph was bored so he asked himself a different question” isn’t good enough—doesn’t really seem to merit attention (by itself). But how Richard Rorty’s first famous article, “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories” (1965), displays the central conceptual move that leads to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and from there to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, but equally that that first article is not Rorty’s answer to the mind-body problem, nor is Mirror Rorty’s final answer about philosophy—that is interesting. It takes time to show, and to show it is to shed new and needed light on what Rorty was really doing.
2. This search for an inner dialectic works quite well when approaching the central American Romantics, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. It’s easy to tell a “death of the imagination” narrative with Hawthorne and a “retreat to private expression” narrative with Melville. Emerson’s tale of development was established definitively by Stephen Whicher. Whicher’s Freedom and Fate (1953) is the beginning point for any serious scholarly work on Emerson, [7] and especially any work on Emerson as a philosopher. For Whicher’s book is about Emerson’s “inner life,” and Emerson’s inner life was taken up by the obsession with intellectual problems. Whicher shows how Emerson is a philosopher in Alexander Nehamas’s sense, someone whose art of living is bound up with the propounding of theoretical theses. [8]
Whicher’s central story is one of “acquiescence” (xvi). The general gist goes like this: Emerson’s first stage was the impress of the typical New England heritage of a Calvinistic belief in God’s Providence. However, do to the watering down of “the white-hot core of the original Calvinistic piety” (8) in Unitarianism, Emerson became susceptible to Humean doubt. This doubt laid waste to all the underpinnings of his faith in Providence, without actually touching the faith itself. This meant that natural, rational, and supernatural paths of justification were out for Emerson, but what saved him was the realization that God was within him—Emerson turns the original Protestant Reformation into a full-blown revolution. “The rock on which he thereafter based his life was the knowledge that the soul of man does not merely, as had long been taught, contain a spark or drop or breath of voice of God; it is God” (21).
So the first two stages of Emerson’s development, that take us to the resignation of his post in the Unitarian Church, give us the interaction of two fundamental principles to understand Emerson: 1) his faith in God’s Providence becomes Emerson’s Principle of Compensation which is then supplemented by 2) the God-within which becomes the Principle of Self-Reliance. The story that Whicher tells is that in the third stage the Principle of Self-Reliance expands into a kind of power madness, “that when Emerson found a basis for the assertion of unconditional good, in his discovery of the God within the soul, the law of compensation slipped into a subordinate place in his thoughts” (39). Finding God within gave Emerson the sense that all of our shackles were man-made, and thus paled in comparison to the power we had when we relied instead on God for support. Mad with his belief that he could do anything, Emerson’s Principle of Self-Reliance quite naturally collapses under its own weight, from the unbalanced ratio between claims-of-power and evidence-for-power. The more the world “remained obdurately independent of his will” (60), the more he saw that the Principle of Self-Reliance was clearly not all there was. So in the fifth and final stage, the Principle of Compensation returns in order to circumscribe the power announced by Self-Reliance. And so the promise of freedom Emerson felt with the discovery of the God within is diminished as he acquiesces to the encompassing demands of fate.
3. There is something very powerful and importantly right about Whicher’s narrative. However, there are two interlocked problems that should lead us to dissent from the conclusions Whicher draws about Emerson’s philosophical attitude. The first is the condensation of the proposed shift between all five stages at the very beginning of his career. The evidence Whicher accumulates doesn’t point at a steady development, but that the major movement of acquiescence has already occurred by Essays, First Series (1941). Nature (1836) is, without a doubt, a bewildering text that does not see Emerson at the height of his powers, but everyone affirms that all the action is in his first two books of essays. [9] How can his most powerful moments be an acquiescence?
Given that the evidence of the interplay between the Principle of Compensation and the Principle of Self-Reliance is present at minimum in seed form even at the beginning of his career as writer, it is equally easy to mark not a sharp break but a gradual unfolding of the essential elements of his mature thought. The difference between the two is that what Lawrence Buell calls Whicher’s “tragic lapse theory of Emerson’s inner life” [10] doesn’t do well in suggesting that Emerson has a coherent philosophy. In essence, Whicher explains away incoherence as biographically legible conflict that is, indeed, conceptually bunk. This treatment, of course, is given industrial strength justification by Emerson himself, his most famous line being “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (“Self-Reliance”).
So the second problem that leads from the first is that Whicher’s account doesn’t precisely help us read the final product. The reason is simple: there’s a reason that Emerson’s journals were raided for the final product of his polished essays and that things appeared as they did, and other things (from the journals) disappeared as they did. The question is what those local reasons were, something that would aid our ability to interpret how the essays hang together as they stand. We should not use the journals to explain away the need for us to think hard about what Emerson was meaning to do in the essays. Barbara Packer, in her book which we should see as an extension of Whicher’s account, summarizes the scholarly problem well in relation to Nature: the problem is in “finding a stylistically sensitive way of reconciling a diachronic account of the book’s genesis and growth with a synchronic account of its structure.” [11]
The main thesis I would forward is that Whicher-Packer lapsarian accounts are broadly right about Emerson’s biography, but wrong about his philosophy. I think such biographical sleuthing has been successful in establishing that Emerson’s initial, cosmically high hopes about the power that could be unleashed within each of us were tragically dashed—what I don’t think they’ve done as well in is in suggesting what Emerson did with that tragedy in constructing his philosophy. In particular, formulating the account as lapsarian gives us exactly the wrong handle on the heart of Emerson’s thought. Emerson may have thought in such biblical terms as the Fall of Man, and mythologized the paradox of having infinite power within while continuing to fail without in those terms, but the central strain of Emerson that faces the future breaks radically with these modes of thought, and so to interpret him according to them is to darken precisely what is most enlightening about him on our problems.
4. Whicher’s problem, I think, is that he doesn’t ascribe enough importance to what I shall call Emerson’s Principle of Mood. I think the hidden message of Emerson’s trajectory is not the fundamental importance of the struggle between the optimistic power of Self-Reliance against the pessimistic power of Fate (which has significant prima facie evidence in the trajectory to The Conduct of Life), but the struggle between the promise he felt in Self-Reliance and it’s ephemerality in the face of changing moods. The Principle of Compensation, which is always overinfluenced by Emerson’s faith in Providence (which is quite cheery), gives way to Mood as the most important element waging battle against Emerson’s optimism. It isn’t optimism vs. pessimism, but optimism vs. optimism/pessimism.
The conceptual source of Whicher’s rhetoric of acquiescence is his sense that Emerson is trying, and failing, to find a way to live in the Power of His Soul all the time. I think all of the following summarizing moments go wrong on precisely the point I’m addressing, and they mount in a steady progression (italics are all mine): “Though not quite ready himself to give up to the soul beyond the possibility of a quick self-recovery, the thought then central to his mind was of a new state of life, a state of greatness and freedom beyond anything in human experience, into which, if he could only hit upon the password, he and all men might at any moment enter” (48); “If freedom lay only in the total self-trust of greatness, and if in fact he could be great only in inceptions and not in act, how did his new faith free him?” (70); “Even if we drop the question of action, and seek on ‘Reality,’ the problem still remains, How is such wholeness to be won and kept?” (83-4); “But the radical defect of man, the creator in the finite, is his incapacity to maintain his creative force. ‘The only sin is limitation’—but this is original sin beyond the power of grace” (97); “Man is promised the world—a promise perpetually renewed and never kept” (111). You can tell Whicher’s account begins to lose explanatory power when he perversely construes Emerson’s exuberant redescription of sin as a lapsarian tragedy. He may, biographically, have been looking for a password and totality, but the philosophy we get in its finished form is not like this. Emerson’s tragic optimism lays precisely in his giving up of the desire for completeness—not as a lost hope, but as a dumb hope. (And this, to me, seems perfectly consistent with having to be reminded oneself about how dumb one’s hopes might be.)
I think we can find this sense of duality—between the elated promise of independence and the depressed realization of its fragmented nature—in his published work, from beginning to end. Less than a year after the publication of Nature, Emerson writes in his journal “A believer in Unity, a seer of Unity, I yet behold two.” [13] For Emerson, Unity is the essence of God and thus Self-Reliance’s promise of power, and thus duality is a fragmented deflation of that promise. What I think we find in Emerson’s writing is a dualism between monism/dualism—depending on mood, he sees the world through one lens, and then another.
The importance of the circumscription of mood is that it creates a radical positionality to the Emersonian utterance. And this is how we are to understand Emerson’s hobgoblin—for while it makes sense to say that you cannot hold both “there is a god” and “there is no god,” what sense does it make to say that you cannot be both happy and sad? Oh—at the same time, sure, but it certainly doesn’t make any sense to say that a person is being incoherent when they wake up in the morning happy and end the evening sad. Emerson’s radical thought is that our assertions about the world are equally relative to the mood we are in when we make them. And this then makes conceptual coherence a more complex affair to adjudicate the importance of. This means that to understand the most important syntactical unit in the Emersonian corpus—the sentence—you have to ascribe a mood, and that way mount a picture of coherence relative to the kinds of moods. The Principle of Mood is essentially the claim that it is rhetoric all the way down, that we are always contextually and rhetorically defined—but more, for it points the way toward a necessary expansion of our conceptual accounts to include the emotions, passions, temperament, attitude. So while the last half the 20th century has pretty much seen the rhetorical stance become common sense for the intellectuals, we still have Emerson sitting beyond.
5. On the surface, the necessity of understanding the text in context seems so obvious in terms of understanding anything as having one particular meaning as opposed to another that to invoke it to justify apparent contradiction looks suspiciously convenient (which is what many of Emerson’s contemporaries thought—Melville, for one). So I’d like to give one example that illustrates how Emerson uses this thought in a constructive mode. Emblematic of this general train of thought is the first two essays of Essays, Series Two: “The Poet” and “Experience.” These two essays cannot be read separately without giving a very misleading picture of Emerson’s vision. “The Poet” gives us a predictably up-beat picture—by this time, even to his contemporaries, Emerson was The Optimist. “The poet is the sayer, the namer … a sovereign, and stands on the centre.” “The Universe is the externization of the soul.” “Poets are thus liberating gods.” But in “Experience,” Emerson uses the death of his son, Waldo, to establish the much darker tone of the piece, offering this disturbing reaction:
In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me,—neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity; it does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.I don’t intend to here attempt to read this passage, which continues to shock our sensibilities. (I should add that Emerson’s grief in his journal is overwhelming—if there is anything in his published work that needs to be understood according to the Principle of Mood, it is this passage.) For now I simply offer the above two cross selections to establish the tenor of the essays as a whole. What I want to instead compare are two examples of a more specific procedure that Emerson uses to great effect in these two essays. Compare these two passages, and ask yourself—which essay does it come from?
I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.If you guessed I would be tricky and put the second essay first and the first second, you’d be right. The mood of the two passages are so starkly opposed—the first depressing while the second, though speaking of the sad nature of the poet to be useless in society, makes it sound great. What I want to punch up are the two lines that express the same conceptual thought but in two precisely different attitudes, like an apple being looked at from two different directions. “Nature does not like to be observed” and “Thou shalt lie close hid with nature.” This is an allusion to an aphorism of Heraclitus, “nature loves to hide.” In the darker essay of “Experience,” Nature’s tendency to hide from us is really our fault, the “most unhandsome part of our condition.” But from a different direction, the poet is who transcends this condition (and thus liberating gods for it) though at the expense of being lost to social intercourse. (“To be great is to be misunderstood,” as Emerson says in “Self-Reliance.”) One more:
For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine; thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console thee with tenderest love.
That also is the best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the world, like a ball, in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems; how mean to study, when an emotion communicates to the intellect the power to sap and upheave nature: how great the perspective! nations, times, systems, enter and disappear, like threads in tapestry of large figure and many colors; dream delivers us to dream, and, while the drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence.Again, the moods are so clearly juxtaposed. The poet, drunk on his power to say, would sell off everything else—which is precisely the dark fringe to this dream, the nightmare hanging off in the wings: What if it is all an illusion? If it’s an illusion, then getting drunk on it seems to just double down on a shitty hand. Emerson’s early life took Humean skepticism very seriously, and these two passages perfectly illustrate Emerson’s constructive use of that early encounter. Emerson conceptualizes romanticism’s promise of power as a dream, which is both its best and worst feature. Progress is contingent on our ability to actualize the dream in the world, but what then is the world but an endless succession of particular people’s dreams? This is how you make the epistemological skepticism of Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume practical again. (Something, I should add, Hume I think already began to do if Annette Baier’s reading of him is right in A Progress of Sentiments.) For the output of this line is not paralysis, as a practically lived Cartesian skepticism would be—if you are self-conscious enough about mood circumscribing speech acts, as I think Emerson is, then the mood in which you become depressed about mood circumscribing speech acts and how it just shows it all to be a sham, an illusion, “so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within” [14]—then you’ll also recognize that sometimes you aren’t in that mood. And this suggests to me that the point of this juxtaposition of moods on the metaphor of dreams is that what we must really beware is not the act of saying tout court, but the drunkenness of dogmatism—self-reliant saying can forget its fallibility in its moment of power, of changing the shape of the world by changing what it is possible for us to dream of.
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem.
6. Since Whicher supplies all the evidence needed to modulate his case, I think it’s easy to see the slant he puts on it as an unfortunate Mumfordism. While above I attempted to show what the conceptual source of the rhetoric of acquiescence was, it’s nearest historical source is Lewis Mumford’s groundbreaking and very influential The Golden Day (1926). With Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, and Waldo Frank, they composed the “Young American” critics, a group of wide-ranging intellectuals and cultural critics whose central philosophical preoccupation in the early 20th century was an attack on John Dewey and pragmatism for, essentially, not being radical enough. After Mumford’s chapter on the central American Romantics (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville), “The Golden Day,” follows his chapter on William Dean Howells, Twain, and William James, “The Pragmatic Acquiescence.”
What is valid in idealism is the belief in this process of re-molding, re-forming, re-creating, and so humanizing the rough chaos of existence. That belief had vanished: it no longer seemed a genuine possibility. … It was an act of grand acquiescence. Transcendentalism, as Emerson caustically said, had resulted in a headache; but the pragmatism that followed it was a paralysis. This generation had lost the power of choice; it bowed to the inevitable; it swam with the tide; and it went as far as the tide would carry it. [15]I don’t wish to whitewash Mumford’s complex relationship to James, Dewey, and pragmatism, but his view of it was perhaps a little overinfluenced by Santayana’s criticism of Emerson through James as “the genteel tradition.” For it’s not hard to see how Emerson himself led to the situation—the divine providence that became Emerson’s Principle of Compensation later became what Emerson called “fate.”
Rather than confuting Mumford’s particular interpretation of pragmatism, I want to close by offering this more general observation about the conceptual resources of James and Dewey’s pragmatism. What I think Mumford and Whicher misunderstand about Emerson and the pragmatists is the importance of romantic self-transformation. They saw the essentially conservative character of “reality” and instrumentalism, but didn’t see how the Emersonian tradition was attempting to unlock a radically different orientation to a necessary recognition of the crossed axes of self-preservation and self-transformation. When Whicher sees Emerson try to assimilate the world’s resistance to the Poet’s Self-Reliance by his Principle of Compensation, he thinks Emerson has sold the pass to inevitability. In instrumentalism, we see how ends must first be fixed before deciding on what means or instruments one uses to carry out those ends, and thus how it doesn’t provide the opportunity to change those ends. But this understanding of Dewey’s instrumentalism completely ignores what Dewey tried to articulate in his notion of the means-ends continuum—that in the process of formulating a set of means to carry out a defined end we alter our sense of what end is desired, thus setting off a dialectic, as now new means are needed for the new end, the search for which will again alter the end-in-view, requiring new means, ad infinitum. [16] If we think of romanticism as the movement of thought that apotheosizes the transformative character of human power, we will see that while Mumford’s interpretation of pragmatism plays down the importance of romanticism in pragmatism in favor of Emerson and Whicher’s interpretation of Emerson plays down the importance of romanticism in Emerson in favor of pragmatism (unfortunately, on this view), and that what we really need is a view of Emerson and pragmatism that integrates their views of transformation and resistance, continuity and change, future and past into a coherent conceptual account. [17] It isn’t for them that we must do this, for it certainly may well turn out to be the case that we will have to reject some of their particular ways of understanding things—this is for us, for if Rorty is right, then figuring out how to get their conceptual projects to work is a way for us to understand how to get our conceptual projects to work.
Endnotes
[1] Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 78
[2] This is obviously a very particular understanding of what philosophy is, roughly romantic. For example, it’s the picture that is unveiled in my discussion of John Barth—see the third section of "On Literature's Accidents."
[3] From the beginning of “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” which can be found in Berlin’s Russian Thinkers or The Proper Study of Mankind.
[4] Quoted in Christopher Tayler’s “Tables and Chairs,” London Review of Books, March 21, 2013.
[5] This was the burden of Robert Brandom’s “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” in his Perspectives on Pragmatism. Rorty’s response was that Brandom’s paper gave him “a more flattering view of the course of my work than before. Brandom has suggested a coherence between my earlier and my later writings that had not occurred to me. I had not seen that there was a connection between the eliminative materialism I was urging in the 1960s and the private-public distinction I have been urging since Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. My unconscious has been more cunning than I had realized” (“Response to Brandom,” 190n4, in Rorty and His Critics).
[6] When you look at Hawthorne, you find a writer with a fairly stable vocabulary for tropes, an intense desire to make those tropes about troping, and an abiding concern about his ability to trope—so we can spot a trajectory wherein many of Hawthorne’s tales and sketches thematize the problem of writing within them, to his three vital novels—all in some manner internalizing the problem of writing, whether Hester’s needlework or Holgrave’s daguerreotyping or Coverdale the minor transcendental poet—to the final Marble Faun, all about death, representation, and the death of representation. Tack on Hawthorne’s inability to finish his final projects and you have a pretty good outline for a “death of the imagination” narrative. (If you want a display of what "thematizing the problem of writing" means, you might check out section 2 of "Work and Idleness.") When you look at Melville, you find a writer fascinated by the act of storytelling, but struggling to find his real voice as a writer. All his books through Moby-Dick are first-person narratives, and after encountering Hawthorne’s work and its literary-conceptual gymnastics, Melville writes his Great Book, publishes it, begins writing the next, and as the bad reviews of Moby-Dick come out, we can see him transforming Pierre into something that seems designed to fail (gloriously, for the book is brilliant). And The Confidence-Man—there’s no protagonist, no narrative! (On the surface, only, of course.) After that he gives up prose entirely for poetry, never publishing another story (Billy Budd was unfinished and posthumous) and writing the longest poem in English (barring, I believe, The Faerie Queene), nearly 18,000 lines, and some other short lyrics in the last 30+ years of his life. This story, reading his increasing impenetrability as a form of private expression, is the burden of Edgar Dryden’s Monumental Melville.
[7] Along with F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941), which obviously has a much larger scope. I hope to say something about Matthiessen’s book soon.
[8] See the “Introduction” to Nehamas’s The Art of Living. Nehamas makes a number of other distinctions in approaching theory and philosophy, all of which are pertinent to understanding Emerson. In particular, as Nehamas himself notes, the kind of philosopher his study is in large part about (Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault) are often called “literary” because central to their act of philosophy is the process of self-creation that happens in the written medium. Additionally, Nehamas’s exemplars “do not insist that their life is a model for the world at large. They do not want to be imitated, at least not directly. That is, they believe that those who want to imitate them must develop their own art of living, their own self, perhaps to exhibit it for others but not so that others imitate them directly. Imitation, in this context, is to become someone on one’s own; but the someone one becomes must be different from one’s model” (10). The relationship to the Emerson who said “imitation is suicide” (“The Poet”) and the Thoreau who said “I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account” (Walden, Ch. 1) should be obvious. However, Nehamas has never given any attention to the relationship (genealogical or otherwise) between Emerson and Nietzsche, though everyone who works on either is well aware of it. Nehamas’s story in that book is structured by the obsession his three later writers had with Socrates (and, hence, Plato). And given that two major heroes and influences on Emerson were Plato and Montaigne, there might be an interesting story to tell about the refraction of ideas through all these prisms of intellectual power and self-reliance.
[9] Considering Emerson’s Principle of Transition, that “power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition” (“Self-Reliance”), an argument could be made about the nature of Nature’s power being based on its slippery fluidity. That is, however, not an argument I intend on making, nor will I discuss the Principle of Transition. Nature is great fun, but Emerson’s acme is in the 1840s work.
[10] Buell, Emerson, 98
[11] Emerson’s Fall, 29
[12] The argument I would make about Emerson’s central line of thought—which is clearly well beyond the space afforded here, and beyond my present grasp anyway—is analogous to the arguments Hans Blumenberg and Bernard Yack mount against philosophers of history like Karl Löwith and Eric Voegelin. The latter two basically formulate narratives in which today’s modern, secular problems are simply the revenging of old, religious problems because our secular terms are simply written over the palimpsest of religion. (This is sometimes called the “secularization thesis,” and Löwith’s Meaning in History is paradigmatic.) By contrast, Blumenberg and Yack in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and The Longing for Total Revolution, respectively, attempt to show how some secular conceptual mechanics are genuinely new moves that produce new problems with no precursor in the older modes of thought. What I think is important in understanding Emerson are the reasons for his formulation of self-reliance as self-reliance, and not “God-reliance,” in Whicher’s very influential conflation (57). There’s no doubt in my mind that Emerson sincerely believed that God was within, and so that self-reliance was in some way God-reliance, but the conceptual work being done by his formulations of self-reliance were ultimately antithetical to belief in any and every form of God that is not found within—and this means that most forms of religion are behind the Emersonian curve. Furthermore, I think there’s a reason why his synonym for self-reliance in “Self-Reliance” is “self-trust” and not “self-faith” as well.
[13] May 26, 1837
[14] This is from the extraordinary close of Ch. 42 of Moby-Dick, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” I use it here as a placeholder for a larger discussion about the Melvillean and Emersonian strands of antirepresentationalism that I find pervasive in the central American Romantics. For in “Experience,” Emerson comes as close as he can get to the apocalyptic pessimism Melville displays in his mature work about the very possibility of representation, of there being any point to this pathetic negotiation we call “life.” Emerson articulates it—and somehow swerves back to optimism. I think of Melville and Emerson standing to each other as, in a manner, Derrida stands to Rorty. Rorty recognizes Derrida’s “arguments” as having an affinity to pragmatism’s antirepresentationlism, but equally that that rejection does not a pragmatist make. To make inroads on this angle, one should coordinate “The Whiteness of the Whale” with Derrida’s “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” (in his Margins of Philosophy). Compare Ishmael’s rhetorical question, “is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?” to Derrida’s thesis: “White mythology—metaphysics has erased within itself the fabulous scene that has produced it, the scene that nevertheless remains active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible design covered over in the palimpsest” (213).
[15] The Golden Day, 83 of the 1957 Beacon Paperback edition
[16] Brandom has reformulated Dewey’s notion of the means-ends continuum for Rorty’s notion of what Brandom calls the “vocabulary vocabulary”: “Every use of a vocabulary, every application of a concept in making a claim, both is answerable to norms implicit in communal practice—its public dimension, apart from which it cannot mean anything (though it can cause something)—and transforms those norms by its novelty—its private dimension, apart from which it does not formulate a belief, plan, or purpose worth expression” ("Vocabularies of Pragmatism," Perspectives on Pragmatism, 153). It's worth pointing out that here Brandom is attempting to assimilate some very specialized points in the philosophy of language with Rorty's taking up of the Mill-Berlin tradition of articulating a public/private distinction in order defend liberalism, but that given Emerson's own preoccupation with the distiction society and solitude, there might be some interesting resources in Emerson to think through this angle on pragmatism that Brandom has done so well in bringing to light. For a different application of Brandom's philosophy of language to the public/private distinction, see my "A Spatial Model of Belief Change."
[17] Despite the previous note, Brandom has rejected romanticism as an important genealogical root of pragmatism. See my discussion of this in “Pragmatism as Enlightened Romanticism.”
Friday, June 21, 2013
Work and Idleness in the American Romantics
1. Perry Miller and the Puritan work ethic — Idleness as sin — Melville’s harpooners — Allegory — Melville’s nothing is really something; 2. Hawthorne’s Old Manse — Thresholds as thematic — Hawthorne’s prefaces — Romance as enchantment; 3. Veils and eagle-eyed reading — Idleness and enchantment; 4. Emerson: do your work; 5. Thoreau: converting experience into poetry — Don't be a tool — Ecumenicism and ineffability; 6. Indirection — Precision and drift
1. Ever since Max Weber, we’ve come to know a certain hard-headed dedication to self-abnegating work as “the Protestant ethic.” In America, we know this to be the Puritan work ethic. Perry Miller records it well:
Whatever the real sources of this work ethic and whatever its relationship to the growth of an industrial economy, the fact is certain that in the mid-19th century, American intellectuals thought of this work ethic as tied to industrialization and as Puritan in spirit. The relationship of the American Romantics, however, to this work ethic was qualified at best. One interesting thread to be pulled out of the rich cloth of their commonalities is their use of “idleness.” Idleness is quite nearly the Puritan sin par excellence, a term embedded in their moral vocabularies in a way it isn’t today. For a boy to be called “idle” today—well, first, who on earth would call their child “idle”? We might say “lazy,” but even that word isn’t quite so charged as “idle” was. Idleness was an effrontery to God, in part. So whenever it appears in their work, it is done so self-consciously. It is not a mistake that at the end of the short chapter, “The Dart,” Ishmael says in Moby-Dick that “to insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.” This is one of those moments where Moby-Dick expands suddenly and seamlessly into its largest capacity as allegory, making the world an Ocean and every person a Whaleman.
Is everyone a harpooner, though? I take it not, and I think Melville’s perception is enhanced when we don’t assume that every particular person is the object of his allegorizing (as we would in allegories like Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, where everyone is “Christian,” the protagonist). The Pequod embodies Man’s Mission through Life, both horizontally and vertically. On the horizontal side, there’s not only the fact that there are only men (not a mistake for either the ship or the allegory), but the distinction between crew—from the officers of the ship, all white, to their “squires,” the harpooners, all non-white. By casting Queequeg the Pacific Islander, Tashtego the American Indian, and Daggoo the “gigantic, coal-black negro-savage” as the harpooners, Melville is able to encapsulate the World from the white European’s perspective during the 19th-century’s Age of Imperial Expansion—“the native American [by which he means, not unironically, “white people”] liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles.” [2] But not only this, for there are the many other whalemen on board, from the blacksmith to “Black Little Pip,” who will get lost at sea (physically and spiritually), and the common sailor, who blends into the background, to the “romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men,” who—“disgusted with the carking cares of earth”—find themselves at the topmast and completely forget to call out at the sight of whales, what with “the problem of the universe revolving” in them and all. [3] Thus is Ishmael.
I don’t think it’s a mistake that Ishmael, in a somewhat transcendental guise, is described here as, basically, idle. Melville considered writing, and primarily of the literary kind, “the great Art of Telling the Truth.” These harpooners of the World require rest—subsidized rest if you want your Truth. They look like they’re doing nothing, but it really is something.
2. We see this in Hawthorne as well. At the close of “The Old Manse,” Hawthorne’s sketch of his abode in Concord (rented from Emerson), Hawthorne says this:
This is how, broadly, Hawthorne thought of his prefaces, and “The Old Manse” functions the same way. Notice the parallel between “Old Manse” and “Custom-House” as spatial locations, and further notice how “The Old Manse” begins: “Between two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone … we beheld the gray front of the old parsonage, terminating the vista of an avenue of black-ash trees. … The glimmering shadows, that lay half-asleep between the door of the house and the public highway, were a kind of spiritual medium, seen through which, the edifice had not quite the aspect of belonging to the material world” (italics mine). The reader, moving through “The Old Manse,” parallels his own spectral self moving through the Old Manse’s gateposts, conducted by the narrator to the sights to be seen.
The threshold we are crossing, as I’ve intimated, is into the enchantment of his story. Hawthorne conceived of romance as a kind of enchanting, and itself as a liminal space between “the Actual and the Imaginary,” as he put it in “The Custom-House.” The second set of figures I want to call attention to, then, are mediums—all objects of mediation held a special power for Hawthorne. From the “moonlight” (light from the sun mediated by the moon) that is “a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer” which prefaces his definition of romance, to the “glimmering shadows” we just saw between the highway and the Old Manse which function as a “spiritual medium” (and thus causing the Old Manse to hover between Actual/material and Imaginary/spiritual).
Now, return to our original passage: “In one respect, our precincts were like the Enchanted Ground, through which the pilgrim travelled on his way to the Celestial City.” The Old Manse here becomes a figure for romance, for Hawthorne’s writing. Not only are we primed by the echo of “glimmering shadows, that lay half-asleep” with “the shadows of the orchard, looking up dreamily through the boughs” (the italics keying two more liminalities), but by troping the Old Manse as the Enchanted Ground of The Pilgrim’s Progress Hawthorne is able to: 1) make the Old Manse a liminal space (between beginning and destination, the Celestial City), 2) push the reader further into a literary, figural space (the first was the “spectralizing” I called attention to in beginning “The Old Manse” sketch, but if the reader was able to hold onto reality by considering it a sketch of a real place, and not a literary “making up,” now the reader’s spectral self is pushed through the literary wormhole of “like” and allusion into Bunyan’s narrative), and 3) make the reader into Everyman—just as Christian, the protagonist of The Pilgrim’s Progress, is on the same journey everyone else is on, so too is the reader—and wouldn’t you like some rest?
3. So—Hawthorne is saying something a little different from Melville after all. (Wait for it.) Or is he? If you think of an author as a foe who secretes secrets into his text, then Hawthorne is the wiliest of opponents, and it is precisely what delighted Melville about him. One of Hawthorne’s favoritest of all tropes was the veil, which we’ve already met in the relevant context (in “The Custom-House”): “still keep the inmost Me behind its veil.” Hawthorne repeats this in “The Old Manse”: “So far as I am a man of really individual attributes, I veil my face.” So when Hawthorne (or should we say, “the Hawthorne figure”?) says in the passage we’re primarily focused on unpacking, “Others could give them pleasure and amusement; or instruction … but it was for me to give them rest,” should we trust him? Is this a pose? Part of his veiling of his real meaning? Melville thought so. In “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Melville mocks the idea that Hawthorne, as he was popularly thought, was “a pleasant writer, with a pleasant style,—a sequestered, harmless man, from whom any deep and weighty thing would hardly be anticipated:—a man who means no meanings.” For Melville, however, the Truth had to be veiled as Hawthorne did, because Truth could not be approached directly and could therefore only be intimated “covertly, and by snatches.” And thus only “the eagle-eyed reader” was privy to the Truth.
Hawthorne says his house is for rest and for sleep. But you can’t stay—you want to get to your destination, whatever the “Celestial City” figures for you. More than that, however, are those glimmering shadows “half-asleep” at the threshold of “The Old Manse.” Those shadows, which as a medium are a trope for romance and enchantment, are not fully sleeping. They too are in a liminal space, resting perhaps but also slightly agitated. This is what Melville understood. You could take Hawthorne for merely a pleasant respite from the carking cares of the world, but if you look with sharp eyes, you’ll enter that dream-state where you come back affected by the subtle conceptual vibrations.
One of my reasons for reading Hawthorne so closely is to show how Hawthorne, like Melville, becomes the intellectual equal of our thinkers-in-prose. Literary patterning can just be for fun, but when you start pulling at the threads that make up certain literary writers’ tapestries, you’ll occasionally see far off elements respond to your pulling and open up to you with why—do the pyrotechnics mean anything? In this passage from “The Old Manse,” Hawthorne has thematized idleness into his writing. There is something essentially idle about falling under enchantment—that is part of its work. And this, Hawthorne thinks, is one of the things it is good for.
4. Hawthorne’s experience with work other than writing was debilitating for his writing. While working for the Boston Custom House, Hawthorne writes to his beloved Sophia—who he will not marry until he’s made enough money to support them—that his “fancy is rendered so torpid by my uncongenial way of life, that I cannot sketch off the scenes and portraits that interest me.” [6] After resigning, he joins Brook Farm, the most famous American utopian community of the 19th century. You can imagine how disastrous working on a farm was to his imaginative strength and output. Just four months into the experience he writes to Sophia:
5. Part of this doubt, I think, stemmed from his suspicion that while he preached a message of converting experience into poetry, he didn’t really carry it out. For those who heard “The American Scholar” in 1837 and resonated with “I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low,” there must have been a let down with the abstract discussions of the Law of Compensation and other “spiritual laws.” Thoreau, I think, thought this and his Walden is the outgrowth of carrying out the play Emerson only theorized. (While I like the trope of casting Emerson as the Theorist of the American Epic with Thoreau and Whitman as the authentic Emersonian Epic-Writers, I myself am not a fan of this criticism of Emerson. But that might be because I’m partial to abstract music.)
For Thoreau, we definitely needed to revise our notions of work. Thoreau is our indigenous Critic of Industrialization, and while no economist as Marx was (and disastrously more naïve about the pastoral thematic in his utopic vision), he is at least if not more trenchant on the debilitating effects of a modern industrial commercial economy on a person’s spiritual life. F. O. Matthiessen cogently remarks that Thoreau “preached a gospel of leisure to Yankees” [11] to offset the deeply ingrained Puritan ethic. His most famous line, of course, sets the tone for the point of the Walden experiment: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” Why? Because we have become “the tool of our tools,” and if you don’t hear the contemporary resonance in “when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him,” then I doubt you’ve even heard of a loan.
George W. Bush’s ironic summoning of the Puritan spirit on February 5, 2005 might be one of the greatest symbolic moments in American labor history—to a mother with three jobs, he says, “Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic that you’re doing that.” Rorty used to say quite often that poverty comes before cultural issues because if you’re working three jobs, then you have no time to think about what’s best for your family or yourself, let alone what kinds of spiritual exercises you’d like to pursue or of other people who aren’t your family.
While that might be the most important relationship between work and idleness, there might be a more subtle relationship as well. Remember for Hawthorne that the best romance is halfway between the Actual and the Imaginary, “each imbuing itself with the nature of the other.” It is not pure fictionality that Hawthorne is after—not purely idle fancy. Likewise, Thoreau seems to have understood the problem of purity in either actuality or the imaginary. Despite his flare as a naturalist and eagle-eye for artifacts, Thoreau was wary of a too acute attention to detail. What Thoreau valued was a “sauntering of the eye.” And we can find the word’s resonance for him at the beginning of “Walking”: “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country….’”
6. Emerson talks of “fatal perception” in “Self-Reliance,” by which he means sight of something one cannot avoid. This was Emerson’s conception of intuition, or the influx of divinity, or what it means to be truly oneself (which at the same time makes you like God, and everyone else). I think this strain in Emerson is at odds with an equally dominant thread of indirection, which we also find in Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville. “An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us though its tropes, than afterward when we arrive at the precise sense of the author” ("The Poet"). For Thoreau, this idleness allows us to stray from the path—whatever direction we may have been accurately pursuing, it is not quite that now. “Rambling,” too, has this sense for all four. For Hawthorne, as we’ve seen, the veils reveal as much as they hide, for it is only through a medium that the ideal might imbue the real with its power. And Melville would not only agree with Emerson on reading, but Ahab is the iconic image for avoiding a direct relationship to reality and Truth—Ahab’s quest is for directness, and he unavoidably loses. [15]
We work hard at being precise—at being in control. But perhaps a little idleness would do us some good. Maybe taking our hand off the wheel occasionally, adding in a little drift. It is perhaps against the Puritan ethic that idleness pops into the vocabulary of the American Romantics the way it does, but their thematizing of idleness as a necessary condition for Truth, however variously conceived, is a curious and provocative move. I’m reminded of a passage in Heidegger’s Being and Time: “Things are so because one says so. Idle talk is constituted by just such gossiping and passing the word along—a process by which its initial lack of grounds to stand on becomes aggravated to complete groundlessness.” [16] Since every good pragmatist—as I urge us all to be—is an antifoundationalist, we have to construe what “ground” we’re talking about here so it doesn’t sound so foundationalist-y. One mode of approaching it is to say that the “ground” in question is justification—we’re only entitled to say things about the way something is if we’re on firmer ground than “because I said so!” But if Emerson and Rorty are right, then some one claim about how X is will be circumscribed by the vocabulary one states the claim in. And if this is the case, then as Rorty said, you can’t argue your way into a new vocabulary—you have to jump in feet first. A sentence that doesn’t make sense in an old vocabulary can only be savored or spit out. And savoring it, on this analogy, is giving yourself enough latitude to acclimate yourself to the new taste, i.e. creating the vocabulary within which the sentence makes sense. We have to allow our inference-crunching, justification-demanding brains to be idle long enough to both emit and savor immediately nonsensical things in order for those things to do their work in creating the medium through which they’ll make sense.
Endnotes
[1] The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, 40-41
[2] Moby-Dick, Ch. 27
[3] Moby-Dick, Ch. 35
[4] This is from Melville’s essential “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” It can be found easily in the Norton 2nd edition, edited by Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford.
[5] Melville’s copy of Mosses from an Old Manse has a number of marginal scoring marks toward the end of this passage, which suggest to me that he vibrated to the thought here being articulated.
[6] May 29, 1840
[7] August 13, 1841
[8] I should also add that a significant portion of his income at this time was an inheritance from the estate of his first wife, Ellen, who died in 1831. Given the nature of the money, being bound up with loss, I can only imagine what additional psychological impact it had on his thoughts about idleness.
[9] October 7, 1840
[10] July 1841
[11] American Renaissance 92
[12] Chapter 1, “Economy” of Walden
[13] Hawthorne even recounts in “The Old Manse” that Thoreau had “a strange faculty of finding what the Indians have left behind them.”
[14] From Thoreau’s journal, quoted by Matthiessen on 90.
[15] And a story for another time, though perhaps meditate on Ishmael’s “key”: “And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all” (Ch. 1).
[16] Macquarrie-Robinson edition, 212 (German 168)
[17] This is what Robert Brandom carries out brilliantly in terms of his pragmatist project of inferentialism in “Dasein, the Being that Thematizes” (collected in his Tales of the Might Dead).
[18] This is the line of thought that moves from Emerson’s “Circles” to Rorty’s “The Contingency of Language” (the first chapter of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity).
[19] CIS 18
1. Ever since Max Weber, we’ve come to know a certain hard-headed dedication to self-abnegating work as “the Protestant ethic.” In America, we know this to be the Puritan work ethic. Perry Miller records it well:
That every man should have a calling and work hard in it was a first premise of Puritanism. The guidebook for earthly existence, William Ames’s Conscience with the Power and Cases thereof [1643], confirmed his authoritative summary of theology, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity [1623], that even the man who has an income must work. Everyone has a talent for something, given of God, which he must improve. Although poverty is not a sin if it be suffered for causes outside one’s control, for any to accept it voluntarily is utterly reprehensible. God has so contrived the world that men must seek the necessities of life in the earth or in the sea, but the objects of their search have been cunningly placed for the finding. [1]There might be a lot of penetrating questions to be asked about the relationship between this theology and a functioning economy. The depth of resonance to our current political rhetoric I pass over as obvious, and Miller records his own sense of resonance to his times (his book was published in 1952) when he suggests that the Puritan clergymen’s jeremiads against the society they saw around them in the colonies, “taken in sequence … constitute a chapter in the emergence of the capitalist mentality, showing how intelligence copes with—or more cogently, how it fails to cope with—a change it simultaneously desires and abhors” (40).
Whatever the real sources of this work ethic and whatever its relationship to the growth of an industrial economy, the fact is certain that in the mid-19th century, American intellectuals thought of this work ethic as tied to industrialization and as Puritan in spirit. The relationship of the American Romantics, however, to this work ethic was qualified at best. One interesting thread to be pulled out of the rich cloth of their commonalities is their use of “idleness.” Idleness is quite nearly the Puritan sin par excellence, a term embedded in their moral vocabularies in a way it isn’t today. For a boy to be called “idle” today—well, first, who on earth would call their child “idle”? We might say “lazy,” but even that word isn’t quite so charged as “idle” was. Idleness was an effrontery to God, in part. So whenever it appears in their work, it is done so self-consciously. It is not a mistake that at the end of the short chapter, “The Dart,” Ishmael says in Moby-Dick that “to insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.” This is one of those moments where Moby-Dick expands suddenly and seamlessly into its largest capacity as allegory, making the world an Ocean and every person a Whaleman.
Is everyone a harpooner, though? I take it not, and I think Melville’s perception is enhanced when we don’t assume that every particular person is the object of his allegorizing (as we would in allegories like Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, where everyone is “Christian,” the protagonist). The Pequod embodies Man’s Mission through Life, both horizontally and vertically. On the horizontal side, there’s not only the fact that there are only men (not a mistake for either the ship or the allegory), but the distinction between crew—from the officers of the ship, all white, to their “squires,” the harpooners, all non-white. By casting Queequeg the Pacific Islander, Tashtego the American Indian, and Daggoo the “gigantic, coal-black negro-savage” as the harpooners, Melville is able to encapsulate the World from the white European’s perspective during the 19th-century’s Age of Imperial Expansion—“the native American [by which he means, not unironically, “white people”] liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles.” [2] But not only this, for there are the many other whalemen on board, from the blacksmith to “Black Little Pip,” who will get lost at sea (physically and spiritually), and the common sailor, who blends into the background, to the “romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men,” who—“disgusted with the carking cares of earth”—find themselves at the topmast and completely forget to call out at the sight of whales, what with “the problem of the universe revolving” in them and all. [3] Thus is Ishmael.
I don’t think it’s a mistake that Ishmael, in a somewhat transcendental guise, is described here as, basically, idle. Melville considered writing, and primarily of the literary kind, “the great Art of Telling the Truth.” These harpooners of the World require rest—subsidized rest if you want your Truth. They look like they’re doing nothing, but it really is something.
2. We see this in Hawthorne as well. At the close of “The Old Manse,” Hawthorne’s sketch of his abode in Concord (rented from Emerson), Hawthorne says this:
In one respect, our precincts were like the Enchanted Ground, through which the pilgrim travelled on his way to the Celestial City. The guests, each and all, felt a slumberous influence upon them; they fell asleep in chairs, or took a more deliberate siesta on the sofa, or were seen stretched among the shadows of the orchard, looking up dreamily through the boughs. They could not have paid a more acceptable compliment to my abode, nor to my own qualities as a host. I held it as a proof, that they left their cares behind them, as they passed between the stone gate-posts, at the entrance of our avenue; and that the so powerful opiate was the abundance of peace and quiet, within and all around us. Others could give them pleasure and amusement; or instruction—these could be picked up anywhere—but it was for me to give them rest—rest, in a life of trouble. What better could be done for those weary and world-worn spirits? … what better could be done for anybody who came within our magic circle than to throw the spell of a tranquil spirit over him? And when it had wrought its full effect, then we dismissed him, with but misty reminiscences, as if he had been dreaming of us.This is a tremendously resonant passage that illustrates well Hawthorne’s peculiar talents in compression. First, there’s the use of thresholds. Hawthorne returns over and over to a select number of tropes and images, and one of these is the “threshold,” perhaps best illustrated by the beginning of The Scarlet Letter, where Hawthorne’s narrator binds together the “prison-door” (also the title of the short chapter) with “the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal.” This binding not only turns us from the prison door as threshold-for-Hester to the first chapter as threshold-for-reader, but also to “The Custom-House” preface as threshold-for-reader—Hawthorne is delicately moving us into the enchanted precincts of his narrative. We started in real life, and then moved to reading the preface, where the “Hawthorne” we may have met in Concord or Salem or on the cover of the book is transformed first into “the intrusive author” who would “prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil.” After passing through the portal of the preface, this “I” suffers a further transformation into the narrator, which the pause at the “prison-door” (first chapter or physical prison door?) alerts us to.
Were I to adopt a pet idea, as so many people do, and fondle it in my embraces to the exclusion of all others, it would be, that the great want which mankind labors under, at this present period, is—sleep!
This is how, broadly, Hawthorne thought of his prefaces, and “The Old Manse” functions the same way. Notice the parallel between “Old Manse” and “Custom-House” as spatial locations, and further notice how “The Old Manse” begins: “Between two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone … we beheld the gray front of the old parsonage, terminating the vista of an avenue of black-ash trees. … The glimmering shadows, that lay half-asleep between the door of the house and the public highway, were a kind of spiritual medium, seen through which, the edifice had not quite the aspect of belonging to the material world” (italics mine). The reader, moving through “The Old Manse,” parallels his own spectral self moving through the Old Manse’s gateposts, conducted by the narrator to the sights to be seen.
The threshold we are crossing, as I’ve intimated, is into the enchantment of his story. Hawthorne conceived of romance as a kind of enchanting, and itself as a liminal space between “the Actual and the Imaginary,” as he put it in “The Custom-House.” The second set of figures I want to call attention to, then, are mediums—all objects of mediation held a special power for Hawthorne. From the “moonlight” (light from the sun mediated by the moon) that is “a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer” which prefaces his definition of romance, to the “glimmering shadows” we just saw between the highway and the Old Manse which function as a “spiritual medium” (and thus causing the Old Manse to hover between Actual/material and Imaginary/spiritual).
Now, return to our original passage: “In one respect, our precincts were like the Enchanted Ground, through which the pilgrim travelled on his way to the Celestial City.” The Old Manse here becomes a figure for romance, for Hawthorne’s writing. Not only are we primed by the echo of “glimmering shadows, that lay half-asleep” with “the shadows of the orchard, looking up dreamily through the boughs” (the italics keying two more liminalities), but by troping the Old Manse as the Enchanted Ground of The Pilgrim’s Progress Hawthorne is able to: 1) make the Old Manse a liminal space (between beginning and destination, the Celestial City), 2) push the reader further into a literary, figural space (the first was the “spectralizing” I called attention to in beginning “The Old Manse” sketch, but if the reader was able to hold onto reality by considering it a sketch of a real place, and not a literary “making up,” now the reader’s spectral self is pushed through the literary wormhole of “like” and allusion into Bunyan’s narrative), and 3) make the reader into Everyman—just as Christian, the protagonist of The Pilgrim’s Progress, is on the same journey everyone else is on, so too is the reader—and wouldn’t you like some rest?
3. So—Hawthorne is saying something a little different from Melville after all. (Wait for it.) Or is he? If you think of an author as a foe who secretes secrets into his text, then Hawthorne is the wiliest of opponents, and it is precisely what delighted Melville about him. One of Hawthorne’s favoritest of all tropes was the veil, which we’ve already met in the relevant context (in “The Custom-House”): “still keep the inmost Me behind its veil.” Hawthorne repeats this in “The Old Manse”: “So far as I am a man of really individual attributes, I veil my face.” So when Hawthorne (or should we say, “the Hawthorne figure”?) says in the passage we’re primarily focused on unpacking, “Others could give them pleasure and amusement; or instruction … but it was for me to give them rest,” should we trust him? Is this a pose? Part of his veiling of his real meaning? Melville thought so. In “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Melville mocks the idea that Hawthorne, as he was popularly thought, was “a pleasant writer, with a pleasant style,—a sequestered, harmless man, from whom any deep and weighty thing would hardly be anticipated:—a man who means no meanings.” For Melville, however, the Truth had to be veiled as Hawthorne did, because Truth could not be approached directly and could therefore only be intimated “covertly, and by snatches.” And thus only “the eagle-eyed reader” was privy to the Truth.
Hawthorne says his house is for rest and for sleep. But you can’t stay—you want to get to your destination, whatever the “Celestial City” figures for you. More than that, however, are those glimmering shadows “half-asleep” at the threshold of “The Old Manse.” Those shadows, which as a medium are a trope for romance and enchantment, are not fully sleeping. They too are in a liminal space, resting perhaps but also slightly agitated. This is what Melville understood. You could take Hawthorne for merely a pleasant respite from the carking cares of the world, but if you look with sharp eyes, you’ll enter that dream-state where you come back affected by the subtle conceptual vibrations.
One of my reasons for reading Hawthorne so closely is to show how Hawthorne, like Melville, becomes the intellectual equal of our thinkers-in-prose. Literary patterning can just be for fun, but when you start pulling at the threads that make up certain literary writers’ tapestries, you’ll occasionally see far off elements respond to your pulling and open up to you with why—do the pyrotechnics mean anything? In this passage from “The Old Manse,” Hawthorne has thematized idleness into his writing. There is something essentially idle about falling under enchantment—that is part of its work. And this, Hawthorne thinks, is one of the things it is good for.
4. Hawthorne’s experience with work other than writing was debilitating for his writing. While working for the Boston Custom House, Hawthorne writes to his beloved Sophia—who he will not marry until he’s made enough money to support them—that his “fancy is rendered so torpid by my uncongenial way of life, that I cannot sketch off the scenes and portraits that interest me.” [6] After resigning, he joins Brook Farm, the most famous American utopian community of the 19th century. You can imagine how disastrous working on a farm was to his imaginative strength and output. Just four months into the experience he writes to Sophia:
And joyful thought!—in a little more than a fortnight, thy husband [pet name—they were only secretly engaged at this point] will be free from his bondage—free to think of his Dove [another disgustingly affectionate nickname]—free to enjoy Nature—free to think and feel! I do think that a greater weight will then be removed from me, than when Christian’s burthen fell off at the foot of the cross. [allusion to Bunyan] Even my Custom-House experience was not such a thraldom and weariness: my mind and heart were freer. Oh, belovedest, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it, without becoming proportionably brutified. [7]“Free to think and feel!” With these sentiments, Hawthorne probably seems pretty aristocratic alongside Thoreau, especially, and Melville, who tried his hand at manly work at sea. Emerson felt a greater unease about his position, since unlike Hawthorne he didn’t have to work at all. Though Emerson did have some money troubles after he resigned his post in the Unitarian Church, he’d already laid the groundwork for his income through intellectual labor—writing and lecturing. So though Emerson preached a Puritanesque ethic of work, it was carefully modulated to emphasize faith to one’s calling. “The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. … But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A must consider what a blindman’s-bluff is this game of conformity” (“Self-Reliance”). But even while Emerson believed we must hold true to what we were on the inside, he had deep doubts about society’s responsibilities for subsidizing people like he and Hawthorne to sit around and think all day. A few months before publishing his first book of essays, he referred to it in his journal as “a sort of apology to my country for my apparent idleness.” And just months after publishing “With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. … Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. … To be great is to be misunderstood” (“Self-Reliance”)—four months later he records in his journal:
If I should or could record the true experience of my later years, I should have to say that I skulk & play a mean, shiftless, subaltern part much the largest part of the time. Things are to be done which I have no skill to do, or are to be said which others can say better, and I lie by, or occupy my hands with something which is only an apology for idleness until my hour comes again. Thus how much of my reading & all my labor in house or garden seems mere waiting: any other could do it as well or better. It really seems to me of no importance—so little skill enters into these works, so little do they mix with my universal life—what I do, whether I hoe, or turn a grindstone, or copy manuscript, or eat my dinner. All my virtue consists in my consent to be insignificant which consent is founded on my faith in the great Optimism, which will justify itself to me at last. [10]I won’t parse the last bit—discussion of Emerson’s faith in fate is beyond my powers yet. (Why, after all, is it faith in optimism? Faith in the attitude of faith, the providential optimism that all will work out for the best?) To be sure, though, what we see here is doubt about the value of his work.
5. Part of this doubt, I think, stemmed from his suspicion that while he preached a message of converting experience into poetry, he didn’t really carry it out. For those who heard “The American Scholar” in 1837 and resonated with “I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low,” there must have been a let down with the abstract discussions of the Law of Compensation and other “spiritual laws.” Thoreau, I think, thought this and his Walden is the outgrowth of carrying out the play Emerson only theorized. (While I like the trope of casting Emerson as the Theorist of the American Epic with Thoreau and Whitman as the authentic Emersonian Epic-Writers, I myself am not a fan of this criticism of Emerson. But that might be because I’m partial to abstract music.)
For Thoreau, we definitely needed to revise our notions of work. Thoreau is our indigenous Critic of Industrialization, and while no economist as Marx was (and disastrously more naïve about the pastoral thematic in his utopic vision), he is at least if not more trenchant on the debilitating effects of a modern industrial commercial economy on a person’s spiritual life. F. O. Matthiessen cogently remarks that Thoreau “preached a gospel of leisure to Yankees” [11] to offset the deeply ingrained Puritan ethic. His most famous line, of course, sets the tone for the point of the Walden experiment: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” Why? Because we have become “the tool of our tools,” and if you don’t hear the contemporary resonance in “when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him,” then I doubt you’ve even heard of a loan.
George W. Bush’s ironic summoning of the Puritan spirit on February 5, 2005 might be one of the greatest symbolic moments in American labor history—to a mother with three jobs, he says, “Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic that you’re doing that.” Rorty used to say quite often that poverty comes before cultural issues because if you’re working three jobs, then you have no time to think about what’s best for your family or yourself, let alone what kinds of spiritual exercises you’d like to pursue or of other people who aren’t your family.
While that might be the most important relationship between work and idleness, there might be a more subtle relationship as well. Remember for Hawthorne that the best romance is halfway between the Actual and the Imaginary, “each imbuing itself with the nature of the other.” It is not pure fictionality that Hawthorne is after—not purely idle fancy. Likewise, Thoreau seems to have understood the problem of purity in either actuality or the imaginary. Despite his flare as a naturalist and eagle-eye for artifacts, Thoreau was wary of a too acute attention to detail. What Thoreau valued was a “sauntering of the eye.” And we can find the word’s resonance for him at the beginning of “Walking”: “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country….’”
6. Emerson talks of “fatal perception” in “Self-Reliance,” by which he means sight of something one cannot avoid. This was Emerson’s conception of intuition, or the influx of divinity, or what it means to be truly oneself (which at the same time makes you like God, and everyone else). I think this strain in Emerson is at odds with an equally dominant thread of indirection, which we also find in Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville. “An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us though its tropes, than afterward when we arrive at the precise sense of the author” ("The Poet"). For Thoreau, this idleness allows us to stray from the path—whatever direction we may have been accurately pursuing, it is not quite that now. “Rambling,” too, has this sense for all four. For Hawthorne, as we’ve seen, the veils reveal as much as they hide, for it is only through a medium that the ideal might imbue the real with its power. And Melville would not only agree with Emerson on reading, but Ahab is the iconic image for avoiding a direct relationship to reality and Truth—Ahab’s quest is for directness, and he unavoidably loses. [15]
We work hard at being precise—at being in control. But perhaps a little idleness would do us some good. Maybe taking our hand off the wheel occasionally, adding in a little drift. It is perhaps against the Puritan ethic that idleness pops into the vocabulary of the American Romantics the way it does, but their thematizing of idleness as a necessary condition for Truth, however variously conceived, is a curious and provocative move. I’m reminded of a passage in Heidegger’s Being and Time: “Things are so because one says so. Idle talk is constituted by just such gossiping and passing the word along—a process by which its initial lack of grounds to stand on becomes aggravated to complete groundlessness.” [16] Since every good pragmatist—as I urge us all to be—is an antifoundationalist, we have to construe what “ground” we’re talking about here so it doesn’t sound so foundationalist-y. One mode of approaching it is to say that the “ground” in question is justification—we’re only entitled to say things about the way something is if we’re on firmer ground than “because I said so!” But if Emerson and Rorty are right, then some one claim about how X is will be circumscribed by the vocabulary one states the claim in. And if this is the case, then as Rorty said, you can’t argue your way into a new vocabulary—you have to jump in feet first. A sentence that doesn’t make sense in an old vocabulary can only be savored or spit out. And savoring it, on this analogy, is giving yourself enough latitude to acclimate yourself to the new taste, i.e. creating the vocabulary within which the sentence makes sense. We have to allow our inference-crunching, justification-demanding brains to be idle long enough to both emit and savor immediately nonsensical things in order for those things to do their work in creating the medium through which they’ll make sense.
Endnotes
[1] The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, 40-41
[2] Moby-Dick, Ch. 27
[3] Moby-Dick, Ch. 35
[4] This is from Melville’s essential “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” It can be found easily in the Norton 2nd edition, edited by Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford.
[5] Melville’s copy of Mosses from an Old Manse has a number of marginal scoring marks toward the end of this passage, which suggest to me that he vibrated to the thought here being articulated.
[6] May 29, 1840
[7] August 13, 1841
[8] I should also add that a significant portion of his income at this time was an inheritance from the estate of his first wife, Ellen, who died in 1831. Given the nature of the money, being bound up with loss, I can only imagine what additional psychological impact it had on his thoughts about idleness.
[9] October 7, 1840
[10] July 1841
[11] American Renaissance 92
[12] Chapter 1, “Economy” of Walden
[13] Hawthorne even recounts in “The Old Manse” that Thoreau had “a strange faculty of finding what the Indians have left behind them.”
[14] From Thoreau’s journal, quoted by Matthiessen on 90.
[15] And a story for another time, though perhaps meditate on Ishmael’s “key”: “And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all” (Ch. 1).
[16] Macquarrie-Robinson edition, 212 (German 168)
[17] This is what Robert Brandom carries out brilliantly in terms of his pragmatist project of inferentialism in “Dasein, the Being that Thematizes” (collected in his Tales of the Might Dead).
[18] This is the line of thought that moves from Emerson’s “Circles” to Rorty’s “The Contingency of Language” (the first chapter of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity).
[19] CIS 18
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