Chapter 1 - Moods and the secret cause of revolution in Emerson

Summary

Nowhere are Emerson’s philosophical and political thought more intimately coupled than in his work on secret causes. Yet Emerson himself sometimes invites us to miss the significance of secrets that remain secret. At times he sounds like an advocate of the epistemological optimism against which he leads the way. For instance, in Nature (1836) he suggests that everything that matters is knowable: “Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable” (EL 7). In the same book he famously writes of a moment when “I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all” (EL 10). Emerson’s first collection of Essays (1841) includes the following statements: “Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty”; and, “Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass” (EL 290, 297). In The Conduct of Life (1860) Emerson states: “You cannot hide any secret… There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated… As gas-light is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity” (EL 1066–67). Although each of these aphorisms deserves careful reading, I only want them to show how easy it might be to arrive at an epistemologically optimistic Emerson, an Emerson who rejects Hume’s view that “ultimate secrets” can never be drawn out from “obscurity.”

Antebellum thinking about secret causes aims at repudiating an impudent knowingness of which Emerson sometimes appears to be guilty. In “Experience” (1844) Emerson writes of this “impudent knowingness,” claiming that its flavor is worse than of the most extreme lack of knowledge: “The grossest ignorance does not disgust like this impudent knowingness” (EL 475). Later in “Experience,” he suggests that the impudence of this kind of knowingness is not the impoliteness of one who reveals distasteful truths, but rather the immodesty of one who fails to acknowledge that some secrets can never be known. Emerson’s essay figures unknowability as the pudency – that is, shame or modesty, with a feminine inflection – of what he calls “the art of life”: “The art of life has a pudency, and will not be exposed” (EL 483). I take the “art of life” to name the way one moves from one form of experience – one “mood,” as Emerson will put it – to another.