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Emerson, Rödl, and the Life of Nature

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Emerson, Rödl, and the Life of Nature EMERSON'S IDEALIST POETICS: EMERSON, RÖDL, AND THE LIFE OF NATURE A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Robert Darren Hutchinson B.A., Furman University, 1989 Ph.D. Vanderbilt University, 1996 May 2020 Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................... iii Chapter 1. Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 A. The Problem of Emerson’s Poetics ......................................................... 1 B. Emerson’s Ghosts ................................................................................... 9 C. The Writing of Spontaneity .................................................................. 19 D. Overview ............................................................................................... 30 Chapter 2. The Idealism of Sebastian Rödl ................................................................ 33 A. Introduction to Rödl’s Approach .......................................................... 33 B. Preliminary Methodological Issues ..................................................... 41 C. Practical Self-Consciousness ................................................................ 50 D. Theoretical Self-Consciousness............................................................ 73 E. Materialism and Intersubjectivity ....................................................... 88 Chapter 3. Emerson’s Idealist Poetics ...................................................................... 108 A. The Opening of Nature ....................................................................... 108 B. The Problem of Our History ............................................................... 123 C. On Emerson’s Idealism ...................................................................... 137 D. Solitude .............................................................................................. 150 E. The Perpetual Presence of the Sublime ............................................ 156 F. The Transparent Eyeball ................................................................... 170 Bibliography ............................................................................................................... 204 Vita ............................................................................................................................. 208 ii Abstract In this dissertation, I articulate a hermeneutics for reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal text Nature through drawing on the insights of the contemporary philosopher Sebastian Rödl. Particularly, the performative, literary characteristics of Rödl’s quite conceptual work resonate with the poetic strategies that Emerson employs in Nature. In the section on the work of Rödl, I make the performative aspects of his philosophy explicit through a close reading of the way self-consciousness happens in his texts through the language he employs. Rödl refers to his elucidation of self-consciousness as idealism. In the section on Emerson, I show how Emerson’s project of engaging and transforming the individual soul also rests upon a performative idealism that occurs within his writing. Thus, I demonstrate how Emerson transforms the idealism that he inherited from such thinkers as Coleridge and Kant into a poetics of transcendence. The aims of this work point in the directions of heightening the value of Emerson’s texts beyond their historical importance, showing the significance of idealism for both literature and philosophy, and establishing a communication between literature and philosophy along the lines of the poetics of idealism. iii Chapter 1. Introduction A. The Problem of Emerson’s Poetics Emerson’s Nature is not really about nature. Nature’s chapter headings, after its introduction and self-named first chapter, enumerate "Commodity,” “Beauty,” “Language,” “Discipline,” “Idealism,” “Spirit,” and “Prospects” as its specific concerns: we might have expected “Rocks,” “Water,” “Plants,” “Animals,” “Weather,” “Planets,” and “The Cosmos.” The things and concepts Emerson names are essential to human mind and culture, not nature, at least in the traditional sense of this term. If, however, we remember that Nature is a work steeped in the tradition of German idealism, then its focus on the primacy of human consciousness and essential human concepts hardly seems surprising. In his lecture “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson explains this reorientation of the idealist’s approach to describing the world by contrasting it to the approach of the materialist: In the order of thought, the materialist takes his departure from the external world, and esteems a man as one product of that. The idealist takes his departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world an appearance. Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history, are only subjective phenomena. .His thought, — that is the Universe. (TCRWE I, 203) Here, Emerson provides us with an elementary dialectical elucidation of his approach in Nature. Whereas the materialist views herself and the world from a third-person perspective, the idealist begins with the first-person perspective (whether singular or plural) and orders all appearances in terms of its outward directed arrow. To use my pair of my examples from above, to understand “Rocks,” 1 the idealist would ask how we first encounter rocks as relevant appearances (for instance, the relevance of flint for starting fires), rather than assessing them in light of their neutral material being. “Water,” as well, always appears for me first in its value for slaking thirst and the beauty and sublimity offered by its scintillations and vast expanses, etc., and if I want to study its chemical properties as H2O, I only do so through the discipline of a science that allows me to discern an elegant molecular geometry. In this lecture, though it is nowhere nearly as poetically reflective as the great passages from Nature, Emerson is extremely subtle and consistent. In the next sentence following the passage above, Emerson implicitly indicates that we should not consider even “Transcendentalism” as a subject of neutral intellectual interest but should rather encounter it through its relevance for us: “From this transfer of the world into the consciousness, this beholding of all things in the mind, follow easily his whole ethics. It is simpler to be self-dependent.” Transcendentalism is not merely an account of the mind’s relation to the world but rather an account of this for the subject in her pursuit of autonomy. In a parallel move later in the essay, he acknowledges that “the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg” and gives a brief philosophical genealogy of the term, only to transfigure it in the next paragraph once again: Although, as we have said, there is no pure Transcendentalist, yet the tendency to respect the intuitions, and to give them, at least in our creed, all authority over our experience, has deeply colored the conversation and poetry of the present day; and the history of genius 2 and of religion in these times, though impure, and as yet not incarnated in any powerful individual, will be the history of this tendency. (TCRWE I, 207) No one is a “pure” transcendentalist, since sensory affection and the call of material interests are always present, sometimes pressing in such a demanding way that individuals forget themselves and pretend to think of a world without them in it, but here, Emerson follows the articulation of transcendentalism from a theory into a calling, an orientation seeking an incarnation on her way to being poetized within a history of genius, transfigured beyond the body, a spirit waiting for others to inspire. If we place Emerson along such a path, we will witness him change from Emerson the man into Emerson the idea, an idea that travels from him to us on the way to our inheritance of it within the creative projection of our ideal selves. The main argument of this essay is that Emerson’s Nature composes its own sophisticated idealist poetics. The idealism within these poetics is not merely inherited from metaphysical idealists such as Berkeley or German idealists such as Kant and Fichte, although Emerson was variously influenced by their thought. Rather, the brilliance of Emerson’s idealist poetics consists in its blending the project of the self-consciousness of the subject together with a poetic language of self-figuration (figuration as artistic creation and as representation, a sounding of the “unsounded centre,” finding its voice, founding its call). Part of the work in making my argument will involve showing how Emerson deploys these blended configurations in his work. This will require me to take a micrological approach, one focusing on dense or subtle junctures in Emerson’s language at the expense of 3 discussing broad themes or contexts, although I do not consider this to be a close reading in the new critical sense. Sometimes, disclosing the operations within these configurations will involve going beyond Emerson into historical comparisons with other works, such as philosophical texts or poems. Sometimes, this will require
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