Autonomy and the Problem of Control in Moon

1. Spoiler alert! — Sam Rockwell is really quite charming; 2. Freedom vs. control — Freedom of the child vs. freedom of adulthood — Mechanism and humanity; 3. Cultural control — Decency — Puppets in power’s show

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1.      Moon is not exactly a mystery, so I hesitate to preface by "spoiler alert!" For one would be hard pressed to describe what is meant to be discovered that doesn’t follow easily and conventionally from its defining, generic premises (like the powerful corporation doing whatever it can to reduce overhead and increase profit margins). It is, after all, only 20 minutes into the movie before we hear, albeit scrambledly, GERTY scolded for “los[ing] a harvester and employee,” which only precedes the second Sam showing up by 10 minutes. However, this is precisely what makes it a wonderful movie, for by a kind of philosophical austerity, the movie is able to call for a more subtle appreciation of what are subtle problems. By quite nearly resting its entire overt success on Sam Rockwell’s ability to charm the viewer (a good bet), the film eschews the troublesome pretensions the typically follow from auteurs who think they’re going to break new ground in a well-worn genre and instead encodes slivers of wedges into a few moments that can be opened to great profit.

This is what roughly happens: Sam Bell (played by Rockwell) is the lone human employee on a space station on the moon in charge of harvesting it—it seems the corporation he works for has found a way of turning moonrock into serviceable energy, which has solved a number of energy problems back home. Sam pines to return home, but before he can do so, he crashes his mooncruiser. He wakes up in the sickbay with no memory of what happened, but GERTY—the computer employee with limited robotic abilities—helps him get back on his feet. What with one thing and another, though, Sam finds the crashed cruiser with himself inside. Thus begins a series of discoveries about how the corporation runs its operation—but mainly a series of existential conversations between Sam-1 and Sam-2.

2.      In a classic representation of the evils of autocratic power—whether its manifestation in kings, fascists, or CEOs—it is Freedom that opposes Control. “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom,” as Braveheart puts it. Whether in the 1984 version of fear-control or the Brave New World version of pleasure-control, what is seen as being lost is our “negative liberty” to do what we want. [1] “Negative liberty” is Isaiah Berlin’s phrase for the kind of freedom realized when one is not blocked or hindered from doing what one wants. The flipside of negative liberty is positive liberty—the sheer ability to do something one wants. One registers a gain in positive liberty when an institution enables one to do something, while a gain in negative liberty is registered when an institution is hampered from getting in the way of what one wants to do.

When movies focus on negative liberty as the opposite of the evil of Absolute Control, they tend to represent the feature of the heroes that is the Evil Controller’s undoing to be their free will. “You can tell me what to do, but at any time, I can resist you because deep down, I am free.” This then represents the feature of the hero as a kind of unlawfulness, for freedom can only be flexed by breaking the despised rules. Moon can be understood on this model, but I think it treats us to a more subtle understanding of what the problem of corporate control really is. For the beginning of Sam-2’s self-consciousness is his breaking of GERTY’s corporate-dictated stricture against leaving the base (thus precipitating his discovery of Sam-1). However, the reason why Sam-2 breaks the stricture isn’t perfectly assimilable to his being hindered in doing what he wants. It is not as if Sam just wants to go outside—he wants to go outside to do his job. So instead of the hero’s free will being the downfall of the Evil Controller, it is more like a specifically Kantian-Hegelian sense of autonomy that proves the corporation’s downfall. The Kantian-Hegelian sense of autonomy is that one gains freedom by binding oneself to norms, rules, laws. [2] By binding himself to his job, Sam requires the freedom to do his job as is required by the job itself. That this is what’s going on in Sam-2’s rebellion against the stricture is evidenced by his initial reaction to being told he can’t go out to do his job: “I don’t appreciate being treated like a child” (0:24:10ish). Autonomy, on the Kantian-Hegelian model, is the freedom of adulthood, not the freedom of the child, who can play and do as they wish. [3] Autonomy, at its root, is positive liberty gained by taking on responsibilities. Autonomy requires trust, and Sam-2 did not appreciate the sudden distrust in his ability to cope with the problems he was asked to cope with as part of his job.

Seen this way, Kantian-Hegelian autonomy lies at the heart of the difference between mechanism and humanity. What the corporation wishes for is a mechanism that perfectly carries out its desires, but what it has at its disposal is basically a form of sub-contracting—a “job” is created in lieu of the creator’s ability to do a thing him- or herself. However, by subcontracting, one creates a role with responsibilities that must then be given control-free space for the subcontractor to carry them out. Hence, the more an institutional body itemizes the sequence of success in a responsibility, the more automated the role, and hence more mechanical. [4]

3.      This is pretty much all basic, Marxist stuff. On the story Foucault tells about bio-power, it is our increasing ability to extend successfully our control into domains we previously did not know how to that gives the specific cast to modern power. [5] Increased technological control has made us able to itemize responsibilities more effectively. And it would be a lie to say that something like this mechanization isn’t at the heart of the Greek dream of reason—what was always wanted was increased control. However, one wouldn’t have guessed from Foucault’s story that we’ve had certain progressive gains at this same time that we’ve made ourselves more dangerous. The Greek dream of control was born of getting killed all the time by nature (which, as it has often been signified, might be just a stand-in for “something we can’t control yet”). The Greeks dreamed of reducing luck’s grasp on our lives. [6] That doesn’t, on the surface, seem like a bad idea. And part of our ability to reduce luck has been in exerting cultural control—getting people to believe in some ideas (e.g., gravity) rather than others (e.g., witches). So was it a good idea for us to believe in witches? If one thinks not and also concedes Foucault’s point that knowledge is power, then one will receive the full brunt of the crowning irony of Moon. Sam-2, responding to GERTY’s casual remark about rebooting himself and the next Sam to replace Sam-2 after he’s gone: “GERTY—we’re not programmed; we’re people” (1:28:35). Unlike almost every other sci-fi movie with the robot/human distinction in play, this line doesn’t go over like a lead balloon exactly because of its philosophical austerity. But what is the difference then? Programming gives us rights, and power is programming—does that invalidate the rights? So what does Foucault tell us about our humanity? Is the question confused, or outmoded?

There might be a sense in which the question is outmoded, so long as what Foucault did for knowledge is assimilated to Darwin—he shows us that we are just one more species doing its best to survive, knowledge being just one more power-grab against that which puts us at risk. [7] But what does Foucault tell us about Sam-2’s remark to GERTY before the final irony? When GERTY tells Sam-2 that for Sam-2 to succeed, he’ll have to reboot himself, Sam-2 says endearingly, “you okay with that?” We might call that decency, or humaneness, but one of the remarkable things about Foucault’s story is how little he regards the efficacy of powers in the classic liberal story of progress. For example: “As soon as power gave itself the function of administering life, its reason for being and the logic of its exercise—and not the awakening of humanitarian feelings—made it more and more difficult to apply the death penalty.” [8] People being decent to each other plays no role in Foucault’s account, and here we get a sense of the disdain he feels toward typical liberal accounts. And indeed, there is something a little too pat about most upbeat stories about the triumph of liberal democracies (at least, maybe 40 years ago, though still for any story you hear outside of a university setting).

What’s missing from this articulation, however, is the cautiousness we found in The Order of Things. [9] Power is not only anonymous, it is also an agent. “How could power exercise its highest prerogatives by putting people to death, when its main role was to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life to order” (138)? One could substitute GERTY in that sentence and get a similar conundrum to the one GERTY found and Sam-1 and Sam-2 were able to take advantage of. But GERTY, as Sam-2 suggests, is more like a person—an agent, entrusted with powers and responsibilities, that makes decisions about how best to carry out those responsibilities. Is power like that? If, to adapt William James’ famous phrase, the trail of the power serpent is over all, then Power as an agent is as bad as Humanity in all those awful liberal stories of progress, where Providence is seen acting through all kinds of strange puppets. Power, in the sense Foucault seems to deploy it here, is more like the dream of Perfect Mechanical Control that the autocratic villain always wishes for to carry out perfectly its desires. In Foucault’s picture here, we’re just puppets in Power’s show.

But this is a bad historical account unless one is willing to dismiss the reasons why people do the things they do in favor of Hegel-like Hand-of-God treatments of the Real Actors in life’s drama. And all of this just leads us back to the question: what kind of actors are we? Part of the charm of Moon is the simple humanity displayed by the Sams—the little ways in which they behave, none of which have the hyperbolic magnitude needed for a hero, the kind usually hoped for in dystopias. It might be chilling to think that all Sam-2 wants to do is go to Hawaii when he returns to Earth—his lack of rage at the inhumanity with which he has been treated—but such a reduction of scope makes the problem equally manageable for us real, non-hero people. The brief torrent of media chatter we get at the close, most of which articulates outrage at the corporation, emblematizes how not all institutions are facing one way—Power’s way.

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Endnotes

[1] I should add that what is at stake in both dystopias is our ability to want to do certain kinds of things, and that what makes Brave New World, in the end, scarier than 1984 is its more plausible account of how to eliminate fully one’s desire for certain kinds of goods (like reading Shakespeare). If the reason 1984 is scary is that it pictures “a boot stamping on a human face—forever,” then the horror of Brave New World is its ability to more plausibly actualize the “forever” (specifically by not being a “stamping”).

[2] I’ve learned how to understand Kantian-Hegelian autonomy most from Robert Brandom’s first three chapters of Reason in Philosophy.

[3] The interesting comparison to make in this regard is the veneration of youth in Emerson and American Romanticism generally. This has tended to make Emerson’s legacy on our moral atmosphere a kind of willful self-assertion, something more analogous to “knowing with your gut,” as Stephen Colbert put it in his parody of George W. Bush’s political rhetoric.

[4] This is why Annette Baier takes trust to be the most important virtue in modern liberalism, for trust is the social relation at the forefront of a relationship in which responsibilities and discretionary powers of action are conferred. And as she says, “one thing that can destroy a trust relationship fairly quickly is the combination of a rigoristic unforgiving attitude on the part of the truster and a touchy sensitivity to any criticism on the part of the trusted” (Moral Prejudices 103). Trust requires room for the entrusted to play the role that’s been asked of them. My emphasis here is on the Kantian tradition’s understanding of autonomy, and I take one very interesting line of investigation to be the rapprochement of the Hegelian and the Humean in their respective critical attitudes to the Kantian model of moral philosophy. For Baier conceives of herself as distinctively anti-Kantian, but as I’ve just intimated, there’s a certain space carved out conceptually that a Humean interest in social-psychological atmosphere can fill. I suspect Brandom, who was a colleague of Baier’s for many years at Pittsburgh, will move us some ways to not only a rapprochement of Hegel with Hume, but with Richard Rorty as well in his (long awaited) forthcoming book on Hegel’s Phenomenology, A Spirit of Trust. (The projected final chapter is entitled “From Irony to Trust: Modernity and Beyond.”)

[5] “Bio-power” is currently one of the hottest pieces of jargon on the market, and it does have significant conceptual resonance (bio is Greek for “life”), even if as a concept it just turns into a mush of noise in many of the attempts to handle it and put it to use. Bearing in mind the Baconian notion that knowledge is power, and how fond pragmatists are of that formulation, Foucault’s introduction of the term makes immediate sense: “one would have to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life” (The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 143). Foucault’s theorization of the complex interactions between knowledge and practice, and how something new happened in the birth of the social sciences in the 19_th century, dovetails interestingly with Judith Shklar’s suggestion that the genre of utopia, until the end of the 18_th century, was largely an “intellectualist fantasy” that, while sometimes harshly criticizing, in no way reflected any sense that things could be changed. And likewise, “the end of utopian literature did not mark the end of hope; on the contrary, it coincided with the birth of historical optimism” (Political Thought and Political Thinkers 167).

[6] My understanding of the Greeks here is deeply indebted to Martha Nussbaum’s fascinating early book, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy.

[7] “Just one more species doing its best” is the slogan-title of Rorty’s July 25, 1991 London Review of Books essay-review of a handful of books on Dewey.

[8] The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 138

[9] Compare the dismissal of sentiment as having a historical role to: “Can a valid history of science be attempted that would retrace from beginning to end the whole spontaneous movement of an anonymous body of knowledge? Is it legitimate, is it even useful, to replace the traditional ‘X thought that . . .’ by a ‘it was known that . . .’? But this is not exactly what I set out to do. I do not wish to deny the validity of intellectual biographies, or the possibility of a history of theories, concepts, or themes. It is simply that I wonder whether such descriptions are themselves enough, whether they do justice to the immense density of scientific discourse, whether there do not exist, outside their customary boundaries, systems of regularities that have a decisive role in the history of the sciences” (The Order of Things xiii-xiv). For a brief discussion of the downside of the rhetoric found here, see “Foucault’s Rhetoric and Posthumanism.”

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:

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.”

Pragmatism as Enlightened Romanticism

1. Phil 101 — Romanticism and religion; 2. Romantic roots, not scientific — Brandom and the second Enlightenment; 3. Rationalism as reasons-for — Irrationalism — Emerson, polychromatic mother of us all; 4. James on religion, meet Rorty's romanticism — Dewey on religion, meet Hawthorne on romance — America's most powerful indigenous thinkers of the 19^th century are not taught in American philosophy departments

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1.     Philosophy 101, and undergraduate programs in philosophy generally, still largely teach the history of philosophy as being about Platonism vs. Aristotelianism and then, for some reason a thousand years later, Rationalism vs. Empiricism, before being transcended by Kant who then bequeaths 20th century philosophy its central problems about the relationship between language and world, fact and value, analytic and synthetic.  For students who take such classes, reading James’s distinction, in the first chapter of Pragmatism, between “tough-minded” and “tender-minded” onto the history of philosophy doesn’t make a lot of sense.  Despite James explicitly aligning Rationalism with the tender and Empiricism with the tough, it’s hard for us on the other side of theoretical physics to understand what the relationship is between “abstract principle” and being a “man of feeling.”

This is because Philosophy Departments still, by and large, do not know how to handle religion.  Almost all Philosophy Departments feel it is their duty to teach the arguments, but regard religion, by and large, as a fallen foe.  And this makes it difficult to breathe life into the animating commitments that made 19th-century philosophy the intellectual inheritor of the much-vaunted war between Religion and Science.  And until Philosophy Departments learn how to write Romanticism into their pedagogical histories, they won’t be able to tell a very good story at all about how we get from Kant to Frege and Russell (the leapfrog they’d rather like to make).

2.     The weird wedding of James’s sensible distinction in temperament to the venerable distinction of pre-Kantian tradition is a function of the weird place pragmatism has in the history of philosophy, one the classical pragmatists did not wholly understand.  For on the whole, it has been the wont of pragmatism’s receivers through most of the 20th-century to think of pragmatism as primarily leaning toward science and the tough-minded.  This changed somewhat as generations of intellectuals at the end of the 20th-century became familiar with pragmatism from its most well-known, and infamous, espouser: Richard Rorty.  Rorty, for better or worse, is known as the primary force behind the resurgence in attention to pragmatism.  And beginning in essays like “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism” (in Consequences of Pragmatism) through Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity to late essays like the handily titled “Pragmatism and Romanticism” (in Philosophy as Cultural Politics), Rorty has tried his best to emphasize the romantic roots of pragmatism while minimizing its roots in reflection on science (best defined in pieces like “Method, Social Science, and Social Hope” (in CP) and “Pragmatism without Method” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth).

It is against this backdrop that Robert Brandom provides an invaluable service to our understanding of pragmatism by reframing pragmatism as a “second Enlightenment” in his “Classical American Pragmatism: The Pragmatist Enlightenment—and Its Problematic Semantics” (in his Perspectives on Pragmatism).  Brandom sees the pragmatists as inheriting empiricism via a Darwinian understanding of the holistic relationship between organism and environment and a statistical understanding of modal necessity.  This primes them for throwing off the remnants of Platonism that Rorty so admires, but makes them susceptible to attack because of the unacceptable “instrumentalist” interpretations of, specifically, their theory of truth.  This instrumentalism is the identification of truth with success.  This Thrasymachean interpretation of truth—making it a mere power play—is heinous to any self-respecting philosopher, and it was anathema to the pragmatists as well.  As Brandom puts it, the trouble with pragmatism’s articulation of a semantics is that they rarely moved beyond, in isolating the meaning of a belief, looking downstream to the consequences of that belief.  Doing so, however, is one of pragmatism’s principle contributions in overturning the equally lopsided semantics of empiricism, which only looks upstream to the circumstances of belief.

3.     What makes pragmatism part of a second Enlightenment is in part its congeniality to a re-injection of—of all things—rationalism.  This is Brandom’s unique contribution to pragmatism.  Brandom has not only worked to undue Rorty’s emphasis on romanticism, but also his sense of Kant as a bête noire.  Nobody talks about the rationalism of pre-Kantian philosophy as worth a hoot, whereas empiricism is still seriously touted as a respectable ancestor.  Brandom, however, identifies a specific angle of thought begun in rationalism (specifically Leibniz and Spinoza) that is exploited and transformed in Kant and Hegel’s idealism—this he calls “inferentialism.” [1] The great modifier to empiricism that must occur is not simply in taking seriously consequences of belief, but also taking seriously two species of circumstances for belief.  Empiricism identifies one: the origin of belief in a perceptual state.  However, rationalism identifies a different one: the reason for belief in an inferential chain.  For Brandom, a successful theory of how language works must combine the insights of empiricism, rationalism, and pragmatism, and it is to the merit of pragmatism that it is able to do so with very little tinkering to its core platforms.

Pragmatism is a second Enlightenment because it extends two central tenets of Enlightenment thought: the naturalism birthed by the flowering of science and a distinctive apotheosis of reason.  It is for this reason that Brandom denies Romanticism any significant role in the composition of pragmatism as a philosophical movement.  He concedes that Romanticism performs many of the anti-Platonistic gestures that pragmatism wields as well against the pre-Kantian Enlightenment, but that its irrationalism is beyond the pale: “though the two movements of thought share an antipathy to Enlightenment intellectualism, pragmatism does not recoil into the rejection of reason, into the privileging of feeling over thought, intuition over experience, or of art over science” (PP 41).

My principal suggestion is that Brandom is just wrong.  Or rather, Brandom is here expressing one of his primary disagreements with his Doctorvater, Dick Rorty. [2]  This disagreement is about how to understand Derrida and Foucault: Brandom, unlike Rorty and like pretty much every other analytic philosopher, views fashionable French nonsense as a species of irrationalism.  Unlike pretty much every other analytic philosopher, Brandom identifies irrationalism in a very precise way that makes an extraordinary amount of sense given his work on language. [3]  Being all that as it may, the best of Romantic thought is about as naïve as pragmatism when it comes to the antitheses Brandom marshals—i.e., if we are being charitable to the instrumental excesses of pragmatism, there’s no reason to be uncharitable to irrational excesses of Romantic thought—and, additionally and more specifically, one will get nowhere with Emerson—the great, polychromatic mother of us all—by thinking he rejects reason. [4]

4.     If the culmination of the Enlightenment was Kant, as Ernst Cassirer has it, and Romanticism is specifically a counter-Enlightenment, as Isaiah Berlin has it, then pragmatism ties together in a coherent philosophy the best of the three worlds hiding inside: rationalism, empiricism, and romanticism.  The best way to see this is to emphasize, as M. H. Abrams does in Natural Supernaturalism, that the historical movement of Romanticism was a replacement for religion.  At the outset I suggested that we weren’t going to understand 19th-century philosophy very well until we wrote Romanticism into our philosophy textbooks, and its convenient that the ease in rebutting Brandom is by recurring to James and Dewey on religion.

Brandom says that pragmatism doesn’t privilege feeling over thought, but this surely flies in the face of the central thesis of James’s “The Will to Believe”: 

Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, “Do not decide, but leave the question open,” is itself a passional decision,—just like deciding yes or no,—and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.

I would certainly concede that what “passional nature” means here is obscure at best, and that what Rorty says in criticism of it in “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance” (in Philosophy and Social Hope) is largely sound.  But what James is pointing at here is what Rorty is pointing at with the notion of a “final vocabulary,” and while it may help to understand how language works to bracket questions of how the trick is done in favor of what the trick is, [5] it will not help our understanding of what it is we do, and what are legitimate doings, to abdicate an understanding of the role of attitudes other than the propositional—i.e., the role of emotions is woefully underdeveloped in pragmatist philosophies.  They play an important but vague role in Rorty’s philosophy, and it’s clear that Brandom does not wish to discount them, but it seems clear to me that pragmatism’s stake in “the passions” is not simple enough to fit with Brandom’s warding off of romanticism.

What is particularly disappointing in Brandom’s dismissal of romanticism is that he says nary of imagination, the most important piece of it to many, if not most, and particularly to Rorty.  And in order to solidify my ground against Brandom with Dewey, I want to point to a passage in A Common Faith that parallels the thought of many American Romantics, and so open up a vista in a larger conversation than that of which just professional philosophers were having.  In the second chapter, Dewey gives this odd definition of “God,” one which Emerson would have recognized:

We are in the presence neither of ideals completely embodied in existence nor yet of ideals that are mere rootless ideals, fantasies, utopias.  For there are forces in nature and society that generate and support the ideals.  They are further unified by the action that gives them coherence and solidity.  It is this active relation between ideal and actual to which I would give the name “God.”

My parallel text is not Emerson, however, but Hawthorne.  In “The Custom-House” preface to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne defines romance as “a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.”  There is a lot more to be said about the relationship between American Romanticism and pragmatism, and indeed, a lot more to be added to the conversation—already at work in tracing the Emersonian roots of pragmatism—about the relationship between the optimistic Emersonian strain of American Romanticism and the pessimistic Hawthornean-Melvillean strain.  American philosophy, and intellectual life generally, is in a strange position regarding its 19^th-century traditions.  Unlike on the Continent, it is clear that until quite near the end of that century, there were no powerful American thinkers who were professional philosophers.  And this poses a problem for understanding American philosophy, when that century’s most powerful indigenous thinkers are taught in English departments.

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Endnotes

[1]  Brandom tells a potted version of this historical story in the long introduction to his Tales of the Mighty Dead.

[2]  I have to believe this willful writing out of romanticism is quite self-conscious, for Brandom even goes so far as to suggest that Rorty “thought that the biggest contribution philosophers had ever made to the culture more generally was the Enlightenment” (PP 108). This is quite a strong misreading, very much in the honorific Bloomian sense. For even if one emphasizes that Brandom said philosophers, you can’t miss the fact that Rorty thought Hegel one of the principal contributors to the flowering of romanticism. The philosophical anti-authoritarianism that Rorty articulated in his late writings, and Brandom traces to the Enlightenment, may be the first step, but Rorty would’ve demanded the second step toward the romantic apotheosis of imagination. It is not a mistake that in the same last volume of essays that includes “Pragmatism and Romanticism” there is no corresponding essay entitled “Pragmatism and the Enlightenment.” For better or worse, Rorty could not be convinced that there was enough to be redeemed in Kant (unlike Brandom), and felt that the Enlightenment philosophers were mainly, rather, responsible for our continued entrancement with Platonism, the original philosophical authoritarianism.

Brandom’s best piece of evidence for Rorty’s sympathy with his misreading is Rorty’s 1996 Ferrater Mora Lectures, “Anti-Authoritarianism in Epistemology and Ethics,” which Brandom attended—and Rorty never published together. One of those lectures was surely “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism,” which Rorty published in a French journal in 1999 and failed twice to publish in the two volumes of collected essays that came out from its time of composition until his death. And even in that piece, he calls the relationship between pragmatism and the Enlightenment a “useful analogy” and can’t help but mention the R-word in the same breath as Brandom’s E-word: “Dewey was convinced that the romance of democracy, a romance built on the idea that the point of a human life is free cooperation with fellow humans, required a more thorough-going version of secularism than either Enlightenment rationalism or nineteenth-century positivism had achieved” (7). The rhetoric here is important, I think, in seeing the relative emphases between Rorty and Brandom, and the lines of misreading Brandom is involved in in displacing Romanticism for the Enlightenment. Not only can Rorty not but help inject “romance” into his qualified appreciation of the Enlightenment, but “required a more thorough-going version of secularism” doesn’t quite intimate the continuity of tradition that Brandom would like to establish between Kant and pragmatism. And further, what Rorty means by “the romance of democracy” is actually meant, I think, to establish a distinction between what Rorty referred to in his 1997 Spinoza lectures as the two projects of Enlightenment, one political and the other philosophical: “one was to create heaven on earth: a world without caste, class, or cruelty. The other was to find a new, comprehensive worldview which would replace God with Nature and Reason” (Truth, Politics, and “Post-Modernism,” 35). The first project—the Millian project of founding a democratic ethos—Rorty wants to defend, but the second to criticize, for he is one of those “who think that the Enlightenment philosophers were on the right track but did not go far enough. We hope to do to Nature, Reason, and Truth what the eighteenth century did to God.” There’s the idea Brandom is talking about, but in Rorty’s hands, I think, it was in the service of the first project that the 18th-century “did it to God.” The political project is the project of antiauthoritarianism, extended into philosophy as anti-Platonism.

So the qualification that Rorty would make to Brandom’s formulation is that the Enlightenment philosophers did make a huge contribution to the larger culture, but it wasn’t as philosophers—more like as pamphleteers, as cultural propagandists. Voltaire is more important here than Kant, and though Voltaire was a philosophe, who is it who isn’t read in Philosophy Departments, again? Rorty’s conception of philosophy as cultural politics does make Voltaire a philosopher—and so validate Brandom’s assertion (sans “biggest,” again in deference to Romanticism)—but Brandom, I think, meant philosophy more narrowly. For while Rorty thought that there wasn’t anything that was distinctively philosophy, Brandom does think this, and what it does is precisely the form in which Kant’s contribution was made. Philosophy is concerned “to understand, articulate, and explain the notion of reason” (Reason in Philosophy 1), and what Kant did for us in the name of the Enlightenment political project is begin to show us that reason is a social-normative enterprise and not an authoritarian faculty. Rorty was never convinced by Brandom, whose “reinterpretation of Kant’s doctrine of the primacy of the practical is as charitable as it is ingenious,” that we shouldn’t rather emphasize the gaps between Kant and Hegel, instead of the continuities (“Some American Uses of Hegel,” 41). However that may be, I find Brandom’s strong misreading of Rorty and pragmatism very persuasive, so persuasive in fact that the only real response to it is to re-romanticize it.

[3] For example, Brandom says that the strand of irrationalism he identifies with Derrida “has its roots in the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century.  It claims that giving and asking for reasons is just one game one can play with words, and that only a self-serving conspiracy of philosophers and scientists has convinced people that it deserves any privilege at all over all the other playful and artistically creative things one can do with language” (RP 144).  Brandom has, to my mind, shown convincingly that Rorty’s rhetoric gets away from him when it seems he’s saying this—to get pragmatism to work in the philosophy of language, we have to repudiate, as Brandom likes to put it, Wittgenstein’s thesis that “language has no downtown”: it does, and it is the game of giving and asking for reasons (cf. RP 120).  Rorty ran this direction because of his appreciation of the power of metaphor.  In the end, I think, Brandom’s rationalism has to be augmented by Rorty’s romanticism, for though Brandom carefully circumscribes the area of his project in order for others to fill in gaps he self-consciously avoids glancing in, there’s no reason to pigeon-hole Romanticism as a kind of dandyism. 

[4]  One might begin here by meditating on the parallels in themes, lines of thought, and verbiage between “Intellect” in the First Series and “The Poet” in the Second.

[5]  This is another favored way for Brandom to circumscribe his project.  In describing the philosopher’s relationship to cognitive science, he says cognitive science is “concerned with the broadly empirical question of how the trick of cognition is or might be done.  Philosophers are concerned with the normative question of what counts as doing it” (RP 198).