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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
In 1903, William James began his address to the Emerson centenary gathering at Concord with a meditation on death and memory:
The pathos of death is this, that when the days of one's life are ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy in their passing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so slight a thing…. It is as if the whole of a man's significance had now shrunk into a mere musical note or phrase, suggestive of his singularity—happy are those whose singularity gives a note so clear as to be victorious over the inevitable pity of such a diminution and abridgment.
While James's abridgment of Emerson in the address that followed was unusually apt, Emerson has not been as well served by most who have attempted to call his tune.
1. James, William, “Emerson” in Essays in Religion and Morality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 109.Google Scholar
2. Perhaps James succeeded so well because his opening question, concerning the ways selfhood is composed though memory, picks up Emerson by precisely the right handle. This is also the main theme of Evelyn Barish's excellent study of Emerson's early life, Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
3. For Whitman's claim and its contemporary critical acceptance, see Kazin, Alfred, An American Procession (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), xiv.Google Scholar
4. A representative example of both the praise and the disparagement is Ahlstrom's, Sydney “Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Transcendentalists,” in Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, 3 vols., ed. Smart, Ninian and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2:29-67.Google Scholar For an analysis of recent religious interpretations of Emerson, see my article, “The Open Secret of Ralph Waldo Emerson” The Journal of Religion 70, no. 1 (January 1990): 19-35.
5. Cavell, Stanley, In Quest ofthe Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 28.Google Scholar
6. I have been convinced of the Utility of this periodizing scheme by Fredric Jameson, who loosely correlates each cultural style with a phase in the development of capitalism: from market to corporate to “late.” See his Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 1-54.
7. Lears, Jackson, No Place ofGrace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 34.Google Scholar
8. Emerson, “Ode, Inscribed to W. H. Channing,” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 14 vols., ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, Centenary Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-04), 11:78. Emerson's social thought is discerningly analyzed by Porter, Carolyn, Seeing and Being: The Plight ofthe Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner (MidcUetown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981).Google Scholar Other important recent studies of this aspect of Emerson include Lange, Lou Ann, The Riddle of Liberty: Emerson on Alienation, Freedom, and Obedience (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986);Google Scholar and Howe, Irving, The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9. On the federalist connection, see Cayton, Mary Kupiec, Emerson's Emergence: Seifand Society in the Transformation ofNew England, 1800-1845 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989).Google Scholar
10. It would be correct to say that Emerson evaluated his age in the same way that Marx judged it: as “at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst.” See Jameson, Postmodernism, 47.
11. Chapman, John Jay, “Emerson,” in The Selected Writings of John Jay Chapman, ed. Barzun, Jacques (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), 199.Google Scholar Wendell Phillips is quoted.
12. Chapman, “Emerson,” 150. Firkins's emphasis was similar. In the age's struggles between “liberality and piety; liberty and law,” Emerson pointed the way to a higher integrity, an inclusive poise. See Firkins, O. W., Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915), 360.Google Scholar
13. Chapman, “Emerson,” 166.
14. See Robinson, David, The Unitarians and the Universalists (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 105.Google Scholar
15. Quoted in Firkins, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 94.
16. Ibid., 361.
17. Emerson, “The Poet,” in Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 4 vols., ed. Joseph Slater and others (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971-), 3:28.
18. This becomes the case at least in the generation after Phineas Quimby and Warren Feit Evans. See Braden, Charles S., Spirits in Rebellion: The Rise and Development of New Thought (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963), 35.Google Scholar
19. Mencken, H. L., Prejudices: First Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919), 194.Google Scholar
20. The most consistent attempt to interpret New Thought in the light of economic and cultural conditions is Meyer, Donald, The Positive Thinkers: Religion as Pop Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Oral Roberts (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).Google Scholar The quote from Trine is the subtitle of his most widely influential work, In Tune with the Infinite (New York: Thomas Y Crowell Co, 1897).
21. The best treatment of this aspect of Emerson and Transcendentalism generally is Albanese's, Catherine Corresponding Motion: Transcendental Religion and the New America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977).Google Scholar
22. Emerson, Collected Works, 2:161.
23. See Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary. This line of thought is also developed in CavelTs most recent studies: This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque, N. Mex.: Living Batch Press, 1989); and Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
24. Quoted in Braden, Spirits in Rebellion, 37-38.
25. Noble, David W., The Paradox of Progressive Thought (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), 31–33.Google Scholar
26. For an analysis of this phenomenon as a consequence of positions inherent in the Enlightenment, see Rosen, Stanley, ‘Transcendental Ambiguity,” in Hermeneutics As Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 19–49.Google Scholar
27. This address, delivered in 1911, achieved fame in later years largely through the debunking force of its title. See Santayana, George, Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion (New York: Scribner's, 1913), 186–215.Google Scholar Santayana's most extended treatment of Emerson is the essay “Emerson” in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1921), 217-33.
28. A characteristic traditionalist reading is Pollack's, Robert “The Single Vision,” in American Classics Reconsidered: A Christian Appraisal, ed. Gardiner, Harold C. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958).Google Scholar The best treatment of Emerson as modernist radical is Feidelson, Charles, Jr., Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).Google Scholar
29. Matthiessen, F. O., American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941);Google Scholar Whicher, Stephen E., Freedom and Pate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Paul, Sherman, Emerson 's Angle of Vision: Man and Nature in American Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Bishop, Jonathan, Emerson on the Soul (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
30. Bledstein, Burton J., The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1976), 92.Google Scholar
31. More, Paul Eimer, Shelburne Essays, 11 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921; repr., New York: Phaeton Press, 1967), 11:93-94.Google Scholar
32. Winters, Yvor, In Defense of Reason (Denver: A. Swallow, 1947), 587, 590.Google Scholar
33. Anderson, Quentin, The Imperial Seif: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971).Google Scholar
34. The best-known early refutations of the Charge are Jorgenson, ehester E., “Emerson's Paradise Under the Shadow of Swords,” Philological Quarterly 11 (1932): 274-92;Google Scholar and Whicher, Stephen, “Emerson's Tragic Sense,” American Scholar 22 (1953): 285-92.Google Scholar
35. One more legaey of this period is the hypothesis that Emerson's mature career divides into distinet stages: an early utopian phase up through the Essays: First Series, and a more chastened, mature, and realistic phase that marks his later work, especially English Traits. The idea gets its fillest expression in Stephen Whicher's Freedom and Fate. Either phase could be celebrated or deplored, according to one's taste. However, it now appears that this division reflects unresolved issues in the critics’ minds and, therefore, a partial view of Emerson's project, rather than a crack in the projeet itself. Many recent studies either do without the phase hypothesis or actively eritieize it. See, for example, Michael, John, Emerson and Skepticism: The Cipher of the World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988);Google Scholar and Hughes, Gertrude, Emerson's Demanding Optimism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984).Google Scholar
36. Jameson, Postmodernism, 302-13.
37. For a thoughtful overview of these debates, see Connor, Steven, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989).Google Scholar
38. See Lyotard, Jean-Franqois, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, tr. Bennington, Geoff and Massumi, Brian (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv.Google Scholar
39. Jameson, Postmodernism, 2.
40. Ibid., 4-5.
41. Huyssen, Andreas, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 201-2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Behind this comment lies Peter Sloterdijk's Kritik der zynichen Vernunft, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), with its critique of cynicism as a form of “enlightened false consciousness.” A similar point is made by Connor, Postmodernist Culture, 227.
42. See the final sections of Foucaulfs, Michel The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970;Google Scholar repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 379-87.
43. See especially Rorty, Richard, “Postmodern Bourgeois liberalism,” in Hermeneutics and Praxis, ed. Hollinger, Robert (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 214-21.Google Scholar
44. For another view of this prospect from the left of Rorty, see Ryan, Michael, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). 45.Google Scholar
45. A classic Statement of this position is Derrida, Jacques, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278-93.Google Scholar The politically conservative implications of such views have been sharply criticized by Habermas. See his “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hai Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.:Bay Press, 1983), 14.
46. The language used here reflects the analysis developed by Taylor, Charles in Sources ofthe Seif: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 3–107.Google Scholar Taylor does not address the postmodernism debate directly, but his discussion is as relevant here as to other predicaments in contemporary thought.
47. Hai Foster terms this version of postmodernism a “postmodernism of resistance” in order to distinguish it from the versions that simply celebrate their condition. Some critics have also spoken of a “restorative” postmodernism that repudiates modernism and seeks to recover the traditional verities of art, family, and religion. I agree with Foster, however, that this neoconservative posture is really a form of preor anti-modernism rather than an aspect of postmodernism proper. It should not be confused with the kind of position described here, which attempts to develop new moral orientations out of the postmodern condition itself. See Foster's Introduction to The Anti-Aesthetic, xii.
48. Jameson's prospectus for the project of “cognitive mapping” is in Postmodernism, 51-53 and 399-418; see also his discussion of the conservative implications of the abandonment of such concepts on 334-36. Cavell refers to “acknowledgment” as a “relation to the world's existence… somehow doser than the ideas of believing and knowing are made to convey” in “An Emerson Mood,” The Senses of Waiden, expanded ed. (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), 145; see also The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 329-31. Bernstein, Richard links phronesis with praxis to outline a new departure for contemporary thought in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983;Google Scholar repr., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), especially Part 3, “From Hermeneutics to Praxis”; and for a different constellation of similar themes, see Rosen, Hermeneutics As Politics.
49. Michael, Emerson and Skepticism, 154.
50. Ellison, Julie, Emerson's Romantic Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984);Google Scholar Cheyfitz, Eric, The Trans-Parent: Sexual Politics in the Language of Emerson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981);Google Scholar Carton, Evan, The Rhetoric of American Romance: Dialectic and Identity in Emerson, Dickinson, Poe, and Hawthorne (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
51. Porter, Seeing and Being. A central text for this line of thought about Emerson is his comment in the essay “Fate”: “every spirit makes its house; but afterwards the house confines the spirit.” We are at once participants in the construction of social reality and prisoners of the mystique of its permanence. See Emerson, Works 6:9.
52. West, Cornel, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Geneology of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
53. The quote is from Pease, Donald, “Emerson, Nature, and the Sovereignty of Influence,” Boundary 2 8 (1980): 66;CrossRefGoogle Scholar see also Kronick, Joseph G., American Poetics of History: From Emerson to the Modems (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984).Google Scholar For Bloom's views, see A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 176.
54. On “moral perfectionism,” see Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome.
55. Emerson, “Experience,” in Collected Works, 3:43.
56. Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16 vols., ed. William Gilman and others (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960-82), 5:307. While this double-consciousness has long been recognized by critics, the new note is a willingness to take it at face value, as an ultimate datum, and not as something that really ought to be papered over in a transcendental synthesis.
57. Emerson, “Nature,” in Collected Works, 3:140.
58. Ibid., 1:7.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid., 1:39.
61. Emerson, “Cirdes,” in Collected Works, 2:184.
62. Emerson, “Experience,” in Collected Works, 3:35.
63. See Harold Bloom's persuasive case for the centrality of Emerson's agonistic war against the fathers, fueled by “the anxiety of influence,” in A Map of Misreading.
64. Emerson, “Nature,” in Collected Works, 1:29.
65. Ibid., 1:35-36.
66. See Cavell, “An Emerson Mood,” in The Senses of Waiden, 145; and In Quest of the Ordinary.
67. Emerson, “The Poet,” in Collected Works, 3:19.
68. Emerson, ‘The Over-Soul,” in Collected Works, 2:168.
69. In part, the danger arises from the conditions under which vision is achieved. In contrast to the world of the fathers, characterized by rhetoric and strife, the realm of the mothers is characterized for Emerson by solitude and inwardness. However, solitude breeds its own impulse toward tyranny. “Solitude would ripen a plentiful crop of despots. The reduse thinks of men as having his manner, or as not having his manner….”; that is, as versions of the imperial seif. See Emerson, “Nominalist and Realist,” in Collected Works, 3:140.
70. Emerson, “Nominalist and Realist,” in Collected Works, 3:143-44.
71. Emerson, “Nominalist and Realist,” in Collected Works, 3:140-41.
72. Emerson, “Give All To Love,” in Complete Works, 11:92.
73. This connection between Emerson and pragmatism, with specific reference to the nature of selfhood, has been explored recently by Poirier, Richard, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (New York: Random House, 1987;Google Scholar repr., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); and by Hansen, Olaf, Aesthetic Individualism and Practical Intellect: American Allegory in Emerson, Thoreau, Adams, and James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar