Literature as Equipment for Living and as Spiritual Exercise

1. What is a literary scholar, critic?; 2. Kenneth Burke, literary critic — And his idiosyncratic vocabulary; 3. Sociological criticism — Naming a situation strategizes it — Literature as alembicated naming; 4. Acts of distillation — Warehouses of equipment; 5. Life as adventure — Beliefs as habits of action; 6. Spiritual exercises — You only know what you can remember — Cycling through pathways of belief — Reflection as detour from action; 7. Literature as self-help? — You don't only believe what you can remember — The self as equipment; 8. Complex literature and simple assertions; 9. Exercise with the narrative form — A longing for shapeliness; 10. The experience of reading — Acting through literature; 11. Literature is difficult — Not everything should be difficult — Democratic humanism

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1.      In my English department, the graduate students have formed a small colloquium that regularly meets to discuss someone’s work in progress. What has increasingly become pressing to me as a scholar-in-training is the question of what a scholar is, of my self-image as a literary critic. And this partly because it’s obvious that we grads all individually seem to have different ones, have an increasing variety available to us as critical tradition extends itself, and don’t have a space in which we can reflect together on this kind of self-reflection. There are literary theory courses, but rarely an opportunity to talk together about what it is we do. So I delivered the following as a talk to provoke a discussion about our own, individual self-images as literary critics. I framed the discussion around the two slogans in my title, in part because what I find helpful is to talk about alternative images or metaphors or distinctions for self-definition.

2.      “Literature as equipment for living” is a slogan of Kenneth Burke’s. A friend of mine in the department had asked me what I had been reading this past winter break, and I said excitedly, “Kenneth Burke’s Attitudes Toward History,” and my friend scrunched up her nose and mouth like she’d eaten a stink bug and replied, “ugh, the rhet-com guy?” Rhetoric and Communications is a growing subdiscipline in English Departments around the country, and rhetoric as a disciplinary study has taken Burke to be the father of contemporary rhetorical theory. There’s often an amusing, though sometimes churlish, rivalry between these two halves of English Departments, but let me say, once and for all, that Burke’s main vocation was literary criticism, and not as a founder of rhetorical theory. In fact, reading his work, it’s hard to imagine a school formed out of it at all. (Side note: Richard Rorty once said to an interviewer asking about Rorty’s criticisms of Paul de Man, “I can imagine being grateful for de Man’s obsessiveness, that is, his habit of reducing to nothingness any given text he reads. When de Man does it it’s interesting, but when you get … thousands of de Man clones, it’s merely formulaic. I don’t think anyone would have objected to de Man if he had been a kind of Kenneth Burke figure, not training up generations of students.” [1] Rorty, apparently, wasn’t acquainted with the other side of some English Departments.)

The idea of literature as equipment for living has its seed in Attitudes Toward History (1937), a book that is part Emersonian-pragmatist in affirming the Optimistic, part speech-act/genre theory (the kind of thing you get out of an Ortega or Lukács or Bakhtin), part quasi-Marxist history, and part idiosyncratic dictionary of a critical vocabulary (things like “alienation,” “transcendence,” “efficiency,” “casuistic stretching,” “character-building by secular prayer,” “being driven into a corner” and—my favorite—“heads I win, tails you lose”). “Equipment for living” is a metaphor that Burke regularly employs, like the pragmatist habit of asking for the “cash-value” of an assertion or how one would “cash out” a metaphor. What follows is an attempt to spell out how I cash out his metaphor, but I begin by taking it to be his master-trope for the relationship between language and action. Here is a characteristic way Burke talks with it—in his discussion of William James, he begins by saying:

For his philosophic trinity [James] proposed ‘rationality, activity, faith.’ Faith invigorates the power of action; rationality provides method for the act. And since by rationality is meant a willingness to consider all available evidence, it should shape the act by tests of completeness and consistency. All of his fundamental assertions were designed to equip him and others for living. He ‘accepted’ the universe by admitting any faith (in progressive evolution, in God, in the benefits of prayer) that enabled him to have the sense of moving towards something better. … And so strongly did he need the concept of Better rather than the concept of Best, as a way of equipping himself for action, that he rejected absolutism always, preferring even the asymmetry of ‘pluralism,’ a doctrine that outraged his form-loving colleagues. (5-6)

One will notice that this is fundamentally a pragmatist stance because it treats language—in this case, assertoric prose—as having an ethical function that swings free of truth. Indeed, by foregrounding assertion as having a function that is not truth-affirming, he risks outraging the same pieties the classical pragmatists did in their own instrumentalism about truth, potted in the misleading formula “truth is what works.” [2]

3.      But literature is not assertoric prose—it does not make assertions, at least not explicitly. Or rather, not explicitly by the author. So we have at least two different pragmatic contexts with which to judge the metaphor. Before I get to talking about what that might mean for us, I want to just keep plunging ahead with literature. In 1938, a year after Attitudes Toward History was published, Burke published an essay entitled “Literature as Equipment for Living,” codifying his thoughts about this metaphor and the orientation it implies for the literary critic. (You can find it in his Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), a book whose first few pages has a line poets love, “the symbolic act is the dancing of an attitude” (9). To understand that line’s formal dimension, you have to read it against Yeats [3], but its embodiment of pragmatism I’ll return to momentarily.)

In the essay “Literature as Equipment for Living,” Burke suggests that what he is up to in his work, and his selection for key critical terms “purpose” and “motivation,” is a “sociological criticism of literature” (293). To unpack this, he takes up the notion of proverbs and says that what they do is name “typical, recurrent situations” in the life of a culture. We then “find” ourselves, as it were, in the proverb and are directed in our thinking by it about our own situation. So, as examples, Burke lists off proverbs for consolation (“The worst luck now, the better for another time”), for vengeance (“fools tie knots and wise men loose them”), for foretelling (“keep your weather eye open”), and for wise living (“first thrive, than wive”). “Proverbs are,” Burke says, “strategies for dealing with situations” (296). And playing off the war metaphor of “strategy,” Burke says as against a baffled interlocutor, that “surely, the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art, arising in complex civilizations, could be considered as designed to organize and command the army of one’s thoughts and images…. One seeks to ‘direct the larger movements and operations’ in one’s campaign of living” (298). [4]

And so, Burke says, “each work of art is the addition of a word to an informal dictionary” for one can think of novels as “the strategic naming of a situation.” They “single out a pattern of experience that is sufficiently representative of our social structure, that recurs sufficiently often mutandis mutatis, for people to ‘need a word for it’ and to adopt an attitude towards it” (300).

4.      This might be a good place to stop and collect our thoughts and codify some of the issues in play. I like the idea of taking books to name situations and provide the resources for thinking through them. It first of all requires an act of distillation on our part—these acts can be exceedingly useful, even outside the exam structure. What they provide is the framework of a perspective on how the book is to be read, the pattern in it to be called to the fore. For example, I could say that Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady displays the difficulties a woman faces in searching for autonomy in the face of both a culture of monogamy that infantilizes female choice and an aestheticist culture that flattens the moral parameters of autonomy. And what this distillation does is coordinate the ratios between paradigmatic moments in the text that provide the lens with which to read the other moments—for example, Mr. Touchett telling Isabel that “fortunately ladies are not obliged to give reasons,” Isabel telling Mr. Goodwood that she wishes to be free even to commit some atrocity, and Ralph hoping with delight to see what Isabel will do with her money. From this perspective (spoiler!), Isabel going back to Osmond is the inevitable tragedy precisely because it is the attainment of a robust moral autonomy wherein one takes on the burden of one’s choices.

What we don’t need to say is that a novel names only one situation—I think we can wipe away that possible implication from Burke’s formulation and say that novels, like life, are made up of an indefinite number of patterns of experience. And this, in fact, is what makes them such treasure troves for our equipment for living. For while I say “indefinite,” and really do mean it, novels really don’t present something so unmanageable as all that for the precise reason Burke says: they are concerted mobilizations of a finite range of textual phenomena. No matter what future interpretive lens comes down the pike, Isabel Archer will be a woman. Maybe someone will argue someday (or probably already has) that Isabel Archer is not the “lady” of the novel’s “portrait,” but it had better be the case that Goodwood’s got the penis and Isabel the vajj.

5.      Now, after Burke’s suggestion about naming there’s the actual image of “equipment for living.” “Equipment” suggests to me a wider metaphorical value than the more narrow war metaphor of “strategy.” I think Burke should absolutely be read against Nietzsche in “Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense,” but both should be drained of their violence to establish the underlying adventure of life—and no adventurer ever leaves home without his or her equipment, as every D&D player knows. Without your equipment, you are naked and vulnerable. And this equipment, in this case, is language. This, again, dovetails with a certain philosophical pragmatism about language. The central strain of pragmatism from Peirce, James, and Dewey to Rorty and his student Robert Brandom—they all follow Alexander Bain, the American psychologist and, as it happens, rhetorician, in defining beliefs as habits of action. Our beliefs are not just indicators of but also shapers of our actions in the world. Our linguistic formulations are as much a technological development as anything wrought of iron or wood.

6.      This leads me to a partial segue to the second term of my title: “spiritual exercises.” This is a term established by Ignatius of Loyola’s 17^th century book of that name, but it has been resurrected by Pierre Hadot to talk about a mode of philosophy. Hadot was a colleague of Michel Foucault’s at the Collège de France and was one of the major scholars of ancient philosophy at the end of the last century. (I cannot more highly recommend the English translation of his 1995 book, What Is Ancient Philosophy? as an introduction to Greek philosophy, both for its readability, scope, and erudition.) In an essay entitled “Spiritual Exercises,” and reprinted in his Philosophy as a Way of Life, Hadot suggests that Ignatius’s Jesuit practices were built out of the resources of the earlier Stoic tradition, which had its own traditions of spiritual exercises (if perhaps avant la lettre). Hadot says that “attention (prosoche) is the fundamental Stoic spiritual attitude. It is a continuous vigilance and presence of mind, self-consciousness which never sleeps, and a constant tension of the spirit. … Thanks to his spiritual vigilance, the Stoic always has ‘at hand’ (procheiron) the fundamental rule of life: that is, the distinction between what depends on us and what does not.” And this for the Stoic, he says, “frees us from the passions, which are always caused by the past or the future—two areas which do not depend on us” (84-85).

If you’re like me, you might say, “well, that sounds wonderful—even bypassing the suspicious idea that the future doesn’t depend on me—but how does this spiritual vigilance work? How do I make sure that my self-consciousness is always awake? You can’t just want something or think you are a certain way for it to be the case.” And this is where I find Stoics to be pragmatists avant la lettre, for one important practical measure is the repetition and memorization of linguistic formula:

The exercise of meditation allows us to be reading at the moment when an unexpected – and perhaps dramatic – circumstance occurs. … We must confront life’s difficulties face to face, remembering that they are not evils, since they do not depend on us. This is why we must engrave striking maxims in our memory, so that, when the time comes, they can help us accept such events, which are, after all, part of the course of nature; we will thus have these maxims and sentences ‘at hand.’ What we need are persuasive formulae or arguments (epilogismoi), which we can repeat to ourselves in difficult circumstances, so as to check movements of fear, anger, or sadness. (85)

In the oral noetic economy—which is a fancy way of saying how the activity of knowing works in pre-literacy cultures—you only know what you can remember (a formula codified by Walter J. Ong somewhere). I think this goes for us, too, when we are away from our books, trying to figure out what to do at any given moment. If beliefs are habits of action, then reflection is a matter of cycling through your pathways of belief.

The idea of beliefs being but nodes on a spatial graph of interrelating lines is in part a metaphor given substance by Hans Blumenberg, a friend of Hadot’s and one of the great German intellectual historians of the last century, rivaling Heidegger and Habermas for both philosophical depth and acuity. [5] Blumenberg, in a little known but incredibly insightful essay on rhetoric, suggests that rhetoric be in part understood as a form of detour. It is a detour from action. This produces the old trope of the “man of action” and the “man of thought,” Achilles vs. Odysseus, or worse Socrates, who would stop Euthyphro from acting against his father for impiety with all his pesky little questions like, “do you even know what impiety is?” But consider how reasoning works—by inference. We infer one proposition from another, which means you transition from one sentence to another. In justifying your action, you take the time of multiplying sentences, which is time taken away from acting. Clearly for the Stoic this isn’t a bad thing—they want to mute action entirely in some cases, relieving us of our passions that form the fundamental motivations (hello Burke) for acting.

7.      Turning back to Burke and “literature as equipment for living,” I pull out one way of thinking about it in terms of using remembered pieces of literature to think through life’s situations. [6] And one way of doing this is by formula—either your own distillation of memorable narrative moments or catchy aphorisms of the text itself. Literature, in this way, becomes part of your armament as you meet the demands of life on the field of battle.

You’ll notice, however, that this has made literature into an assertion-generating enterprise, at least as it relates to one’s life, in the form of these maxims or formulas. But, as I noted in section 3, literature isn’t assertoric prose—aren’t there other ways we might relate to literature that might also be important to living? And also: this is kind of making literature sound like self-help. Before turning this last screw, I want to take up a deficiency in the “equipment for living” metaphor that punches up, I think, one of the most important ethical issues of our time. On its surface, “equipment” suggests—like my description of the body naked and vulnerable without it—that there is an inner or essential or at any rate some self beneath the language that articulates it. This is an image from Romanticism, in part codified by M. H. Abrams’ “lamp,” and it is one pragmatists, at least, have to reject. [7] There is no hidden, ineffable self deep down—it is language all the way down, rhetoric all the way down, equipment all the way down.

And while this might spark a metaphysical argument, I want to first note that a shift from “equipment” to “spiritual exercises” helps articulate the pragmatist perspective. Our linguistified self is better thought of as a muscle, and though you only know what you can remember, you don’t only believe what you can remember in the same way that while you may not know that you have a particular muscle, you use it just the same—however, of course, wanting to throw the baseball harder and knowing what operates the humerus may lead you to pounding those pecks a little harder. (Recall Burke’s “dancing of an attitude” formula.)

But secondly, “equipment all the way down” suggests a new handle on the old fears of relativism and the infinite regress. If it’s equipment all the way down, and the point of equipment is to protect your “self,” then it’s just equipment protecting other equipment. While relativism’s fear is that there’s no non-relative basis upon which to judge one’s values, equipment protecting equipment might produce the more radical fear that one was born into the wrong tribe, given the wrong education. Relativism goes fishing for the bottom of the inferential detours, but this perspective sees that we stop all the time to use the equipment we have, whether or not we know there’s a foundation for it. And in a less radical case, equipment protecting equipment produces the problem of knowing which is the means and which is the end—what is a tool that could be discarded for a better one and what is an essential part of what it is to be me.

8.      So, now, back to assertions and literature—as my reintroduction of “spiritual exercises” indicates, one of the reasons why I like books like Portrait of a Lady, Howards End, and Middlemarch, is that they are obviously produced by an extraordinary intelligence working through a complex situation. Solutions are, unlike in philosophy typically, not to the fore here, and one thing I like is thinking through the situations with the author, either via their intermediaries in the form of characters or their tropes via the complex functions of their narrators. This does not, let me hasten to add, work for every book (as my lengthening train of books I have trouble reading attests) as not all books are best named by this meta-perspective.

9.      However, there is another more recent use of the term “spiritual exercises” that goes some way to opening a window on another use of literature. My way to it is to first go back to Hadot and ask for his reason for choosing the word spiritual:

In the first place, it is no longer quite fashionable these days to use the word ‘spiritual.’ It is nevertheless necessary to use this term, I believe, because none of the other adjectives we could use – ‘psychic,’ ‘moral,’ ‘ethical,’ ‘intellectual,’ ‘of thought,’ ‘of the soul’ – covers all the aspects of the reality we want to describe. Since, in these exercises, it is thought which, as it were, takes itself as its own subject-matter, and seeks to modify itself, it would be possible for us to speak in terms of ‘thought exercises.’ Yet the word ‘thought’ does not indicate clearly enough that imagination and sensibility play a very important role in these exercises. For the same reason, we cannot be satisfied with ‘intellectual exercises,’ although such intellectual factors as definition, division, ratiocination, reading, investigation, and rhetorical amplification play a large role in them. ‘Ethical exercises’ is a rather tempting expression, since … the exercises in question contribute in a powerful way to the therapeutics of the passions, and have to do with the conduct of life. Yet, here again, this would be too limited a view of things. …[T]hese exercises in fact correspond to a transformation of our vision of the world, and to metamorphosis of our personality. The word ‘spiritual’ is quite apt to make us understand that these exercises are the result, not merely of thought, but of the individual’s entire psychism. (Philosophy 81-82)

This, I think, moves us a long way, especially with its emphasis on metamorphosis, self-transformation, transcendence. However, in the Stoic exercises themselves, the emphasis on maxims moves us back to putting thought first in priority, as does Hadot’s own formula that the exercises are “thought which takes itself as its own subject-matter and seeks to modify itself.” Is there another kind of exercise, one which the narrative form is peculiarly adapted to supplying?

In Rorty’s late essay, “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises,” [8] Rorty says that

the term ‘spiritual development’ is usually used only in reference to the attempt to get in touch with the divine. But it is occasionally used in a broader sense, one in which it covers any attempt to transform oneself into a better sort of person by changing one’s sense of what matters most. In this broader sense of the term, I would urge that the novels of Proust and James help us achieve spiritual growth, and thereby help many of us do what devotional reading helped our ancestors do. (404)

Rorty says that “aesthetic” and “moral” won’t do in this context because “beauty” and “moral” importance seem too narrow of categories to describe the sense of exaltation that James and Proust cultists feel when reading them. “This sense of exaltation is not the same thing as being bowled over by the sheer rhetorical or poetic power of one’s favorite passages. Such passages play the role that their favorite passages in sacred scripture play for the religious. They become mantras, and reciting them brings very present help in time of trouble.”

The sense of exaltation I am trying to describe is, instead, a result of reading books as wholes, of following plots through to the end, rather than with being rendered momentarily delirious by a startling poetic figure, a perfectly crafted couplet, or a splendidly balanced antithesis. … Following such careers [as Isabel Archer’s or Christian’s in The Pilgrim’s Progress] lifts up the heart by letting the reader hope that she herself might eventually overcome the immaturity, the confusion, and the incoherence of her days. … For the intellectual who finds James and Proust exalting, it is the hope that she will be able someday to see her life in this world as a work of art – that she will someday be able to look back and bring everything together into some sort of pattern … into a coherent story of maturation. It is the hope for rounded completion and self-recognition, and is more like a longing for shapeliness than like the ambition of transcendence. (405)

10.      The experience of reading these books is an analogue to a religious experience—you don’t exactly come away with any new beliefs or formulae. “It is the experience of reading the novel,” Rorty says, “that makes one into a different sort of person, not the utility of a belief one might have acquired by various other means.” And the reason novels are good at this seems clear: they can show maturation. As a form, prose narrative seems better suited for showing it and thus producing that affective conduit that floods our motivational channels with that vague, life-giving substance we call “hope.”

Seeing various forms of literature as spiritual exercises is seeing them as acting on you and as you acting through them. Novels, especially those like Henry James’s or Conrad’s or Faulkner’s, are difficult forests that seem to have to have paths hewn through every time. I find poetry like Dickinson’s and Stevens’s to be spiritual exercises that I respond to, even if I find myself tripping and stumbling, my muscles distorted at angles they normally don’t find themselves in. What do they equip me for? I don’t know always. But I do like making the effort at spelling it out.

11.      But not always. Burke, in his essay on equipment, alludes to his era’s “inspirational literature” and how “it is a strategy for easy consolation” (298). Burke does not shy from this aspect of the sociological approach to rhetorical and literary forms. When I had the chance to teach a course on American Romanticism, on the first day I read them a famous bit by William James in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” whose punchline, after James shows how ignorant he was of the lifeways of po’ Appalachian folk—“losing,” as he says, “the whole inward significance of the situation”—the punchline is: “I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge.” [9] I then posed to my students what I took to be the real problem before us: “how do you, the student, who is likely not going to become an English major let alone become a professional literary critic—how do you negotiate a class like this, what with ‘my strange indoor academic ways of life’?”

It seems natural to me to see this as implicitly a question about literary value, or “what is literature?” I confessed that I had no idea how to define literature or the literary, and instead suggested a distinction between works that challenge and those that don’t. To be properly democratic about “taste,” we can be snobs in our private lives, but not in our theories of the public good—you are not a “better person” for enjoying Moby-Dick over Harry Potter; different books have different purposes, and it isn’t clear that non-challenging works aren’t serving a good purpose (relaxation, for example, or derisively, “escapism”). An example is my inability to watch challenging movies, including most dramas—I rationalize it by saying it’s probably because I read challenging books all day, but either way, I’d much rather laugh to Will Ferrell or watch The Bourne Identity for the eighth time than try and watch Cronenberg or Twelve Years a Slave. [10]

The idea behind the occasional elitist stance toward books, and the idea that every democratic humanist believes intimately, is that it is good to be challenged; it is a primary social good to be challenged; it is an intrinsic good to be challenged occasionally. Notice I say “occasionally,” because it cannot be good to be constantly challenged because then you wouldn’t get anything done—this is the intimate relationship between thought and action that I was early talking about under the heading of beliefs as habits of action and detours. But it is good to be challenged sometimes—that’s the problem of sycophants, “yes men”—but where, when, by whom? Who do you trust to challenge you? I take it to be a mark of freedom that every person gets to decide for themselves when they want to be challenged—though in public matters I take it to be much less up to individual choice about when one can be challenged. The purpose of a liberal arts education is to sample a broad array of areas, avenues, ways of challenging oneself. And that’s pretty much it as far as the root of the humanities goes, and so the idea behind a literature class is to put some books under a student’s nose that I enjoy being challenged by and that maybe they will, too. The title of department under which a course is being offered merely tells you what kind of book you’ll most likely encounter in the course, though all bets are off in the actual course.

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Endnotes

[1] “Worlds or Words Apart?” in TCF 137

[2] On classical pragmatism’s occasional instrumentalism about truth, see “What Pragmatism Is” or the later “Rhetorical Universalism”. An earlier discussion of truth in the history of philosophy that I still like is “Absolute Truth.”

[3]

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
     - Yeats, “Among School Children”

[4] Compare this passage to Nietzsche’s most famous passage on truth: “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically…” (“On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense,” trans. Kaufmann).

[5] I’ve also deployed it to discuss Brandom’s philosophy of language in “A Spatial Model of Belief Change.”

[6] For more on this line of thought about using literature, see my forthcoming “Touchstones.”

[7] Abrams’s book The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) is a still standard study of the intellectual tradition of Romanticism’s revolution in understanding how the mind relates to the world via those two metaphors. Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature does for philosophy what Abrams did for the intellectual traditions of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. (It’s important, in relating those two books and their purview, to remember that people didn’t distinguish the activities of philosophers and poets the way we do now. Abrams’ study is more wide-ranging in its historical depth than Rorty’s, but Rorty’s has more depth in the philosophical significance of the major philosophical figures from Plato to ‘70’s professional philosophy.) Central to the second chapter of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is this point that Romanticism, despite making the important shift away from mirror metaphors (which create representationalist epistemological models like Plato’s and Descartes’), still retains a metaphysically pernicious model of an ineffable self.

[8] Collected finally in The Rorty Reader (2010), eds. Volparil and Bernstein, though it had been available as a manuscript-file for many years at Rorty’s website.

[9] From Talks to Teachers and to Students, in Writings: 1878-1899, 843.

[10] I did try once to rationalize my love of the form of comedy found in Ferrell-Apatow-Stiller by analogizing it to Romanticism. See “Just Bitching.”

Posthumanism, Antiessentialism, and Depersonalization

1. Belatedism — Reductionism — Ceasing to treat “human” as an invidious term of distinction; 2. General problem of antiessentialism — From ethics to epistemology and ontology — Living in the flux — Essences as stabilities — Making distinctions; 3. Taking humans for granted — Taking humanism for granted — Special problem of demarcation — How to make a human less special; 4. Bennett on actants and assemblage — Giving out intentionality — Doing an action, causing an effect; 5. What intentions are for — Global problem of anthropomorphism — Properties vs. attributions; 6. Instrumentals rationality — Tools of our tools — Ancient science as spiritual exercise — Knowledge as depersonalization — Theoretical practices

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1.      “Posthumanism,” in the last 20 years, has become the latest popular entry into our post-’60s craze for being after something, usually some “ism.” Also in the last 20 years, nearly all promulgations of isms come attached with increasingly anxious qualifiers about the promulgator not wanting to reduce the perceived proponents of the ism to his or her formulation, or not wanting to suggest the essence of what the ism is. [1] I find such hand-waving pointless—partly because I take any good reader or listener to have the good sense to feel free to disagree at any point without the author’s encouragement—but this anxiety plays a special role in my topic because of the way reductionism and essentialism have been tied by theorists into a story about the degradation and oppression of humanity—and, of course, now more than just humanity.

In what follows, I’d like to perform two services: 1) I hope to clarify three problems that any posthumanist theorist will encounter in articulating their view: the general problem of antiessentialism, the special problem of demarcation, and the global problem anthropomorphism. What all three of these problems revolve around is the practical aspect of living the theories we propound. Since many posthumanist perspectives articulate themselves in terms that are inherently paradoxical, I hope by clarifying these three problems to point in the direction of a nonparadoxical mode of articulating the central motive of posthumanism—ceasing to treat “human” as an invidious term of distinction. 2) I will re-tell a familiar story of the last 300 years as a means of bring into focus the problem of our practices as the primary object of our ethical inquiries. Posthumanism is nothing if not ethically motivated, so when posthumanist theory finds itself moving away from ethics to epistemology or ontology, it behooves us to reexamine our priorities and their interrelationships. The basic problem central to the “scientific revolution” of the European 17_th century—which typically stands in as the moment the dam broke, flooding our landscape with instrumental rationality—is the assertion of purely egocentric interests. Working through this conceptual and historical exercise, seeing posthumanism’s broader concern with purely human interests, will put us in a position of seeing a larger project of thinking through ethical authority in a world structured only by material, as opposed to supernatural, agencies.

2.      If the central motive of posthumanism is to cease treating “human” as a term of ethical distinction, then one of its central moves has been to cease treating “human” as a term of distinction at all. This shifts the central theoretical terrain from ethics to epistemology and ontology, from how we treat X to how we know what X is. The primary theoretical current that this move draws power from is the antiessentialism common to Heidegger, Sartre, the American pragmatists, and the Continental poststructuralists. We might embody it in Sartre’s slogan that “existence precedes essence.” [2] By overturning the ultimately Platonic relationship that envisions the flux of lived appearances as conceptually beholden to an order of stable essences, antiessentialism emits a panrelationalism—things are not what they are in themselves, but only as they relate to other things. [3] This dissolves any particular thing into a web of relations, and can ultimately cause a fear for stability—how does the antiessentialistic reversal not just flip us into a nasty flux of relations with no footholds for understanding? I think it is fairly clear that no person actually lives their life as if there were no foothold for understanding, as if they did live a flux like a tempest (as opposed to a flux like an oscillating fan). Sartre’s word for this was “metastable.” [4]

If this seems to dissolve the problem surrounding antiessentialism, why am I calling this a general problem for posthumanism? The reason is that though practically we have no problem living in the flux, our theoretical descriptions still tend to contort themselves when describing this practical situation. At root, I think, is the suspicion that existence only precedes essence, that essentialism will always reconstitute itself in the process of understanding. This comes out as a sense that definition, i.e. giving conceptual shape to any particular X, is essentializing. (Need I add “is essentially” or “by definition” to complete the contortion?) This suspicion can largely be traced to origins in poststructuralism, and is best embodied by Gayatri Spivak’s resignation about the state of affairs we must find ourselves in that demands her notion of “strategic essentialism.” [5] Because of the history of oppression through conceptual means that an entire host of cultural critics in the last century have been busily excavating, what was once Plato’s fear for stability has turned into a fear of stability—that any stable entity is covering over the oppression required to achieve that stability. If at one very real extreme is the actual use of linguistic categories to justify the continued oppression of cultural groups and persons, then at the other extreme is the absurdity of thinking that my body’s stable existence at a particular set of spatiotemporal coordinates is papering over my body’s right to exist at every over set of coordinates. There are stabilities, and then there are stabilities. What we need—but what theorists like Spivak are conceptually unable to provide resources for—is the ability to distinguish between the range of stabilities on that ethical scale. So the general problem of antiessentialism is: how do you de-privilege one distinction without harming your ability to make any distinctions? The way to do this, I think, is to replace Sartre’s existentialist formula with a pragmatist formula like, “practice precedes theory.” This turns all theoretical conundrums back to their origins in practice. This makes one’s fear of stability negotiable by turning the suspicion of a particular stability back to the practice being enabled by it—still suspicious given any kind of oppression, but hardly suspicious at all given a body’s continued existence at a set of spatiotemporal coordinates qua continued existence (though the why for, e.g., the prisoner’s continued existence in the jail cell might be up for grabs).

3.      I suspect, as I somewhat suggested before, that theorists have no problem resolving these theoretical problems of definition and essence in practice as persons or citizens (rather than as theorists). But working through the general problem of de-privileging can give us a handle on a second, special problem that emits from the first: how do we demarcate humans from other things? The problem of antiessentialism and the fear of stability are marks of a desire to not privilege anything—but now how do we tell the difference between us and other animals? The amused self-consciousness that accompanies most articles about posthumanism is, I think, not nearly nervous enough about this as a problem. Most theorists of the posthuman seem to take it for granted that we can just tell the difference, but what their work needs to do is provide some handle for how to tell the difference between a human res and a nonhuman res so as to keep the critical edge of their polemic while not resting on either an unarticulated practical grasp or a paradoxical run around wherein we find, ultimately, that we have to ask some portentous “question of the human” every time we want to articulate the difference between a human and a beaver. The former is antithetical to the project of theorizing and the latter I suspect has become popular because 1) people like imitating Derrida, but more importantly 2) they are beholden to the fear of stability that produces the problem of antiessentialism.

Posthumanists do much better when they state their opposition as “humanism,” or “liberal humanism,” or “liberal subjectivity.” What they want to pick out and contest are particular ways in which the human subject is picked out of a crowd. As my use of “res” indicates, we are going to be led back to Descartes—since he distinguished between res cogitans and res extensa, “the mind” has too often been used as the repository for our dreams of difference. But as Rorty retails in his opening chapter of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, there are as many ways to pick out what demarcates the mind—and thus the human—as there are fingers on your hands. [6] The typical approach of posthumanism has been to select one of these marks and reappropriate it for res extensa, thus making the human a little less special. So the special problem of demarcation (which is really just a species of the more general problem of antiessentialism) is: how do you make the human less special while retaining the conceptual ability to tell a human from a nonhuman? Darwin’s naturalism made it possible for Nietzsche to think of us as a diseased animal precisely because of our desire to be special, [7] but the flipside of Nietzsche’s cynicism is John Dewey’s suggestion that Darwin made it possible for us to really get to the bottom of our human cultural practices: “the influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his having conquered the phenomena of life for the principle of transition….” Dewey saw Darwin as making possible antiessentialism, as overturning “the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final” and finally alleviating our desire to “lay hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency.” [8]

4.      In order to see better how the blurring motions of antiessentialisms can make it hard to see what makes humans, if not special, at least their own peculiar selves above and beyond physiology, we might turn to Jane Bennett’s recent book, Vibrant Matter (2010). Bennett wouldn’t call herself a posthumanist, but her book works in the same vein, and its utility lies in how thoroughly Bennett wishes to rethink our ontological assumptions—Bennett pushes to the limit certain strategies commonly used by posthumanist theorists, in particular an effort to rethink ontology with ethical implications. Bennett’s ontology centers on the attempt to reinscribe “things” with a “power” she says they’ve been denied by Kantian accounts of agency, thus giving “the force of things its due.” [9] She does so by using Latour’s notion of “actants” as a way of inscribing intentionality in the nonhuman-thing so as to gain a better picture of the “human-nonhuman assemblage” (her term taken from Deleuze and Guattari). [10]

What this power amounts to, however, doesn’t seem much more than being an active force in the material world. Bennett feels this as a point of resistance that deserves the edge of her polemic because of the old notion of the “passivity of matter.” [11] But what extra power is gained by intentionality, alongside causal power, is unclear—and nobody has denied the material world’s causal ability to blot us from existence. Bennett says that “the question is whether other forces in the world approximate some of the characteristics of intentional or purposive behavior on the part of humans” (29), but this makes the mistake of thinking we know what intentionality is. By assuming she already has a conceptual grasp of intentionality, Bennett is able to show how other things have it, too. But this doesn’t seem very hard. Giving out intentionality is easy—just do it, and you’ve done it. Thinking the rock intended to fall to the floor is enough for the rock to have intentionally fallen to the floor. Who, after all, is going to contradict you (except for theorists not assuming we already know what intentionality is)?

Intentionality is simply things behaving as if other things are behaving intentionally. [12] The problem is that the rock behaves the same way whether we attribute intentionality to it or not—or whether the rock attributes intentionality to us or not. So the only question is whether it is useful to attribute intentions to any particular X. To answer this question about a rock falling, we might compare it to a hand going up in a classroom. If the person whose hand goes up gets “called on,” it is because of a practice the caller-on (and all those who expected the person to get called on) is embedded in. If the person was “lifting their hand” rather than “raising their hand,” we can say that the person “unintentionally raised their hand”—we need this locution to distinguish between doing an action (intentionally lifting a hand to get called on) and causing an effect (lifting a hand and unintentionally getting called on). The movements are the same, but only when embedded in a practice can the movement have a certain effect. So, returning to the rock, what is the added bonus of saying the falling rock intentionally crushed my foot if the effect is the same whether I ascribe an intention to the rock or not?

5.      The moral of this story is that one reason we attribute intentions is because by making actors aware of the effects of their actions, we can get the actor to not perform the effect-causing action. This, at least, is not the case with the rock, though it might be with the person who dropped it on my foot. It is clear that Bennett wishes her new ontology to have an effect on our moral discourse. She gives a series of imperatives toward the end of her book that punches up this problem of intentionality: “Give up the futile attempt to disentangle the human from the nonhuman. Seek instead to engage more civilly, strategically, and subtly with the nonhumans in the assemblages in which you, too, participate” (116). But what could it mean to engage civilly with rocks? Do rocks respond differently if you are rude to them? While behaving more strategically and subtly with rocks might make sense, civility would seem to only be in play if you could change the rock’s behavior by doing so. But what the analogy is for politely dropping a rock and it not crushing my foot because I treated the rock civilly rather than rudely isn’t clear.

This brings us to the final, global problem of anthropomorphism. Bennett sees clearly that she must face the problem of whether she’s anthropomorphizing non-anthropo-stuff by, for example, attributing intentions to stuff we might normally withhold it from. The global problem of anthropomorphism is: how do you use categories of understanding that are not human categories? Bennett sees that what she calls her “vital materialism” seems to “entail a performative contradiction”: “‘Is it not, after all, a self-conscious, language-wielding human who is articulating this philosophy of vibrant matter?’ It is not so easy to resist, deflect, or redirect this criticism” (120). However, there would only seem to be a performative contradiction if you haven’t been able to provide an account for what separates humans from nonhumans. More particularly, it is by treating intentionality as a property instead of an attribution that heaves Bennett’s project into paradox when she admits she has no separate method for ascertaining the properties of rocks except for the regular human one’s we’ve always employed.

6.      Bennett’s confrontation with anthropomorphism, like Spivak’s confrontation with essentialism, emits a general helplessness—for, almost all admit, we can only use human categories. But why should we feel helpless? The reason I think we find ourselves to be helpless or stuck in the position of humanity, rather than, say, thankful or unashamed, is because of the way scientific innovation, technological development, economic consumption, and liberal democracy have all dovetailed into a story about instrumental rationality. This is the story, familiar to us from Germany—be it the Frankfurt School of Horkheimer, Adorno, et al or Heidegger—that the history of the West is the history of Reason increasing our ability to control stuff, including ourselves. In its initial form, the concern seemed to be primarily with us, with succumbing to a “blindly pragmatized thought [that] loses its transcending quality.” [13] Horkheimer and Adorno’s concern was that, not only was our thought simply a means to carry out preexisting and unreflectively held ends, but that the end or purpose of thought had simply become the increased efficiency of means. Unreflectively held purposes dovetails with Heidegger’s discussion of the rhetoric of mathematics and method that took over the natural sciences in the 17_th century and was encroaching on the social sciences at the end of the 19_th. [14] But what’s worse is that, in Thoreau’s phrase, “men have become the tools of their tools.” [15] The central idea is that we are caught up in the practices we’ve created and have become beholden to them, and that these practices are working out a destructive teleology. And since the increasing obviousness of the consequences of global industrialization, this sensed destruction has become both to ourselves and nonhuman nature. As should be clear, this is a pessimistic narrative that implies that we no longer have the hope of changing (Horkheimer, Adorno, and Heidegger’s conclusion) or that we no longer have the desire to (Thoreau’s fear).

I think it is something like this story that stands behind most posthumanisms. [16] Without it, it's hard to make sense of why we should go in for all the arid metaphysical talk. And while I think there is sufficient plausibility for Thoreau’s fear, I want to quickly sketch an alternative narrative about our theoretical practices that takes the edge off the conclusion that we are now hopeless. This story is drawn from Hans Blumenberg’s account of the transition from ancient and medieval cosmology to modern. Central to this account is the notion that for the ancients, theoretical descriptions of the nonhuman were spiritual exercises meant to relieve the pressures of theory itself. [17] For example, as Blumenburg writes, Epicurus’s “atomistic physics was not meant to satisfy a theoretical interest in reality but rather to argue for the irrelevance of the physical answers to the shaping of life in the world.” [18] “Only insofar as physics could be thought of as producing real human power over nature could natural science potentially serve as the instrument by which to overcome the new radical insecurity of man’s relation to reality” (155). Only when science could demonstrate its practical mastery over life, its “real human power,” could science serve as a mode of overcoming. But overcome what turns out to be the real question. It behooves us to make a distinction between our increased mastery over nonhuman forces indiscriminately killing us off and other forms of overcoming—overcoming our parents, parts of ourselves we dislike, our political enemies, precursor poets, etc.

The upshot of Blumenberg’s story is that we should make finer distinctions among the different projects and practices we’ve put into play over the course of cultural history in order to better grasp why we originally created them so as to better understand why we might continue them. One of the central distinctions Blumenberg makes about the outcome of the 17_th century scientific revolution is that philosophers took two divergent paths, that of Cartesian “self-foundation” and Baconian “self-assertion” (see 181-203). [19] As Blumenberg understands it, the mode of self-assertion preceded self-foundation because the central cultural concern they both had eschew was the authority of the ancients (as read by the Scholastics). Thus we find Bacon bashing idols and Descartes retreating to his fireplace. However, as Steven Shapin notes, there was an intense suspicion that accompanied this “intellectual individualism and the rejection of trust and authority.” [20] At this point, it is helpful to make a distinction between the personal and the individual. The individualism common to Bacon and Descartes states that knowledge begins with an individual’s personal experience. The concern, then, is how to make this knowledge portable, intersubjective. This produces different practices intended to depersonalize the knowledge gained firsthand. As Shapin suggests, this amounts to the elaboration of different “practical procedures” (93) such as Boyle’s recommendation “that experimental reports be written in a way that allowed distant readers—not present as firsthand witnesses—to replicate the relevant effects” (107). But another method of depersonalization lies in Descartes’s search for a foundation to knowledge in indubitable certainty. If one could once establish the foundation upon which all knowledge must repose, then one can gain the assent of all inferences from it as common to all because of the necessity created by the demonstration.

It is now generally agreed that Descartes’s foundationalism is an off-shoot of Platonic essentialism, what Dewey called “the quest for certainty” grounded in a “search for the immutable.” [21] What I articulated as the problem of antiessentialism is the problem of searching for replacement practices for the specific theoretical practice of hunting down immutability. Thus this problem becomes paradoxical only if one thinks that a certain set of theoretical practices inevitably ties us into a certain set of self-descriptions and problems—e.g., thinking linguistic practices are necessarily essentializing or thinking intentionality necessary for ethical consideration. Seeing these practices in the light of history, however, can give us a sense of their continuity with other practices motivated for similar purposes and their contingency as practices that can be altered given new situations that require new purposes.

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Endnotes

[1] Two examples—N. Katherine Hayles, a major figure (displaying only slight anxiety): “What is the posthuman? Think of it as a point of view characterized by the following assumptions. (I do not mean this list to be exclusive or definitive. Rather, it names elements found at a variety of sites. It is meant to be suggestive rather than prescriptive)” (How We Became Posthuman (1999), 2); Neil Badmington, writing an introduction (displaying acute anxiety): “What would it mean to view this as an example of posthumanism? The use of such a term is, of course, far from straightforward. Writing in 1947, Martin Heidegger drew attention to the paradoxical status of an ‘-ism,’ observing that…[etc., etc.]. Was I in danger of giving currency to yet another ‘-ism’ devoid of clarity, coherence and credibility” (Posthumanism (2000), ed. Badmington, 1)?

[2] “L’existence précède l’essence” is from Sartre’s essay, “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (translated in Kaufmann’s Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre—see 348). I pass over the irony of using this essay in this context, though the kernel of my reply is embodied in my discussion of anthropomorphism below.

[3] This is the lesson Richard Rorty draws from “philosophers as diverse as William James and Friedrich Nietzsche, Donald Davidson and Jacques Derrida, Hilary Putnam and Bruno Latour, John Dewey and Michel Foucault” (“A World without Substances or Essences,” in Philosophy and Social Hope, 47). Rorty immediately goes on to say that being an “antidualist,” which is how they articulated their antiessentialism, does not mean “that they are against binary oppositions; it is not clear that thought is possible without using such oppositions. It means rather that they are trying to shake off the influences of the peculiarly metaphysical dualisms which the Western philosophical tradition inherited from the Greeks: those between essence and accident, substance and property, and appearance and reality.”

[4] Being and Nothingness, 90. In the context of Sartre’s discussion, metastable seems to connote something closer to instability. But see Rorty’s use of Sartre in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: “Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old. I call people of this sort ‘ironists’ because their realization that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed, and their renunciation of the attempt to formulate criteria of choice between final vocabularies, puts them in the position which Sartre called ‘meta-stable’: never quite able to take themselves seriously because always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change…” (73-74). Something being subject to change is much different than something ceaselessly changing. I think the lesson is that Sartre’s term is a good description of the terrain of antiessentialism, though it originally had to be deployed with more of the polemical edge of flux.

[5] Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is a virtuoso performance showing how ethical and epistemological issues are bound together. Spivak’s term, however, comes from the fact that she does not believe there is any alternative to essentialism, or rather that language is in its nature essentializing. For philosophers like Rorty, as I articulated in note 3, this would be like saying that Platonic dualisms were at the heart of language and unavoidable.

[6] See PMN 32-37. Rorty distinguishes nine different marks of the mental and groups them into three different problem-piles: the problem of consciousness, the problem of reason, and the problem of personhood. I take such refinement of distinction to be the first step toward wisdom in this area.

[7] See On the Genealogy of Morality, 3.28: “If one disregards the ascetic ideal: man, the animal man, has until now had no meaning. This existence on earth contained no goal…. Precisely this is what the ascetic ideal means: that something was lacking, that an enormous void surrounded man—he did not know how to justify, to explain, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meaning. He suffered otherwise as well, he was for the most part a diseased animal…” (117).

[8] From "The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy" (1909).

[9] VM, 29

[10] See ibid., 9 for Bennett’s introduction of Latour’s “actant”; her second chapter discusses the “assemblage.”

[11] See ibid., vii.

[12] I am blithely taking on board Daniel Dennett’s mode of discussing intentionality, principally from The Intentional Stance, as if it is obvious, but clearly this is contentious for philosophers of mind. The general idea is that intentionality is a holistic game that a community weasels its way into by members attributing intentionality to each other. This is how functionalists avoid the Cartesian problem of Other Minds—intentional minds are created when all the members attribute them to each other, and there is no deeper problem than that. What is interesting is that, on Dennett and Rorty’s understanding, Dennett is the heir of Darwin and it is only theorists who wish to retain the mind as a mark of humanity’s specialness that resist Dennett’s functionalism.

[13] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), xiii. I’m quoting from the John Cummings translation, though Edmund Jephcott’s recent translation is likely to become canonical. This line in particular just rings better in Cummings’ translation, though I have no other reason for choosing it.

[14] See Heidegger’s “The Age of the World Picture” (in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays) especially of the notion of a “procedure” being a “fixed ground plan” (118). This kind of rhetoric about math and method is charted succinctly by Steven Shapin in The Scientific Revolution—see especially 57-64 on the problematic notion of the “mathematization of the universe” (63) and 89-96 on the notion that “method was meant to be all” (90). Shapin’s comment that “there is much to commend a revisionist view that formal methodology is to be understood as a set of rhetorical tools for positioning practices in the culture” (95) might be expanded to include the use of mathematics. See also the opening section of Rorty’s “Method, Social Science, and Social Hope” (in Consequences of Pragmatism) for a pithy polemic about what the philosophical upshot of the scientific revolution should have been.

[15] Walden, Ch. 1

[16] My use of Thoreau is partly intended to lend plausibility to this narrative standing behind Bennett. Bennett has a previous book on Thoreau as a political philosopher.

[17] “Spiritual exercises” is a term taken from Pierre Hadot. See, for example, his Philosophy as a Way of Life.

[18] Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 181

[19] My understanding of self-assertion owes much to Rorty’s use of Blumenberg. See, e.g., his “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity” (in Essays on Heidegger and Others), especially where he calls Bacon “the prophet of self-assertion as opposed to self-grounding” (172).

[20] The Scientific Revolution, 72

[21] “Philosophy’s Search for the Immutable” is the second chapter in Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty, which attempts to locate a tradition of philosophical inquiry—specifically metaphysical and epistemological—in our historical and existential condition as beings in the world.

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.”