For Those with Ears to Hear : Emerson, Rhetoric, and Political Philosophy
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FOR THOSE WITH EARS TO HEAR: EMERSON, RHETORIC, AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY RICHARD E. JOINES A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2001 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation committee members at the University of Florida—John P. Leavey, Stephanie A. Smith, Philip E. Wegner, and Robert Zieger—for their help in seeing this project through to its completion. I would also like to thank Michael Hofmann for his generosity and the several incarnations of the Marxist Reading Group, the members of which helped me realize the urgency of my tasks. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my friends Peter Sokal and Ralph Savarese who offered support and guidance, and to Raina Joines whose breadth of knowledge and love has helped me find my way through many a dark passage. What I owe Geoff Waite goes beyond thanks, but I hope these pages both reveal my debt and go towards paying it. 11 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS v ABSTRACT vi CHAPTERS 1 INTRODUCTION: READING BETWEEN THE LINES 1 2 AMERICAN ESOTERICISM 19 Standard Received Emerson and the Problem of Emerson’s Esoteric Rhetoric 19 Rhetorical Difficulties 37 Hiding in the Light, or, Esotericism as Method 56 Emersonian Democracy? 74 The Esoteric Emerson 94 3 EMERSON’S PROLEPTIC ELOQUENCE 97 Strategemata 97 The Young Emerson 104 Education in Eloquence 114 Proleptic Eloquence 118 Emerson, Nietzsche, Hitler, Strauss, or. Borrowing by Anticipation 133 From the Lyceum, or, Emerson’s Agrapha Dogmata 141 To Fashion Great Men 154 4 EMERSON’S COLERIDGE 164 Obscurity and the Asthmatic Reader 164 Prudence as Method 175 Emerson’s Prudence 187 in 5 HOW TO JUDGE OF THE PILOT BY THE NAVIGATION OF THE SHIP 194 Hieroglyphics: Hermeneutics and Composition 194 The Patience of Books 200 E. T. Channing, or, On Leading an Army through Places Infested by the Enemy. .202 Henry David Thoreau, or, Reading Deliberately What Was Written Deliberately. ..208 Plutarch, or, The Daemonic 210 On Reading Emerson Reading 225 Emersonian Magnetism 232 6 ONLY A NAMING OF TOPICS: OF NATURE’S ANONYMITY AND EMERSON’S RHETORIC OF INITIATION 240 Emerson’s Bacon 240 The Anonymous Little Azure-Colored Book 245 The Masquerade 250 The Transcendentalists 256 To Aphorize 263 Hid and Inaccessible, Solitary, Impatient of Interruption, Fenced by Etiquette 269 Fables, Proverbs, and Parabolical Poesy 274 Progress or Return? 279 The Rhetoric of Initiation 287 Things Hidden in Nature 299 BIBLIOGRAPHY 310 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 323 IV , : ABBREVIATIONS BGE Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Trans. Walter Kaufmann (NY Vintage, 1966). EL Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Eds. Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966). J Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals ofRalph Waldo Emerson, Ed. Edward W. Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, 10 vols. (Boston: Houghten Mifflin and Co., 1909-1914). JMN Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks ofRalph Waldo Emerson, Eds. William H. Gilman and Ralph H. Orth, et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960-82). PAW Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). TOM Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). TN Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Topical Notebooks ofRalph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Ralph H. Orth, et al., 3 vols. (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1990. TUP Ralph Waldo Emerson, Two Unpublished Essays (Boston: Lamson, Wolff, & Co. 1895). W Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Standard Library Edition, 14 vols. (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1883). WPP Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). v Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy FOR THOSE WITH EARS TO HEAR: EMERSON, RHETORIC, AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY By Richard E. Joines December 2001 Chair: John P. Leavey, Jr. Major Department: English The Ralph Waldo Emerson explored in this dissertation bears no resemblance to the popular images of Emerson as an optimistic spiritualist or a philosopher of democracy. Instead, I examine Emerson as a Platonist political philosopher and practitioner of the ancient rhetorical art of exotericism/esotericism. Using a methodology for reading esotericism derived from Plato, Maimonides, Alfarabi, Nietzsche and Leo Strauss, I examine Emerson’s theories concerning the “daemonic” potential of eloquence in speech and in books, his understanding of esotericism, pious frauds, and fabling, and the ancient anti-Enlightenment, anti-egalitarian, and anti-democratic thrust of his political philosophy which aims at overturning democratic leveling and instituting rank ordering. Prophetic of his avid reader Nietzsche’s political insights, Emerson diagnosed American democracy as a form of nihilism that seeks to conquer nature and to replace the divine with the merely human. Though Emerson publicly addressed the political and social reforms of his times, he deployed esoteric stratagems and a multileveled form of vi speaking and writing in his lectures and essays. By these means, Emerson hoped to create an audience of noble and virtuous individuals who would become capable of overturning democracy and returning their societies to the ancient categories of “the good” and of “the best regime” and to a philosophy premised on “the natural” as a proper guide to a nation’s moral and political life. Through close examinations of Emerson’s readings of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Montaigne, Bacon, and Coleridge, this dissertation reveals the political and philosophical depths concealed between the lines of Emerson’s seemingly democratic texts. While many accept without question that Emerson’s politics were progressive or liberal- democratic and while others deplore the reactionary nature of his elitism, Emerson’s political philosophy moves beyond simple Left/Right categories. Because Emerson spoke in parables only to those with ears to hear, his relationship to the “modern” philosophical and political arguments of the nineteenth century is more complex than those critics who would historicize or “de-transcendentalize” Emerson believe. To comprehend Emerson’s political philosophy demands close attention to the “initiative” rhetoric of his hieroglyphic speech and writing prudently designed to exclude the many from the truths of the few. vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: READING BETWEEN THE LINES Writing is the greatest of arts, the subtilest, and of most miraculous effect; and to it the education is costliest. —Emerson, “Art and Criticism” (W 12:283) In hours of high mental activity we sometimes do the book too much honor, reading out of it better things than the author wrote,—reading, as we say, between the lines. —Emerson, “Quotation and Originality” (W 8:187) This dissertation is an examination of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s education in and his practice of writing, “the greatest of arts,” and in its subtleties, which he believed could produce miraculous effects. The Emerson explored in this dissertation bears no resemblance to the familiar pop-culture Emerson of naive optimism, self-help psychology, new-age spiritualism, or antiestablishment individualism. Nor is the Emerson of this study the spiritual, mystical transcendental ist Emersonian circulated through innumerable American literature surveys and critical studies, the politically progressive theorist of an American “democratic individualism,” or some precursor to American pragmatism or to European existentialist or poststructuralist thought. My approach does not seek to make Emerson our contemporary or to mine his writings for their relevance to us or to our concerns with textual authority, subjectivity, or discursive hegemony. My reading of Emerson is historical, but not historicizing. Though I am sympathetic to those scholars who “de-Transcendentalize” Emerson by unsettling the a 2 cozy boundaries of Emerson scholarship and rescue his writings from his public image and biography, I find their historicizing of his thought merely according to nineteenth- century notions of power, politics, or science limiting. If Emerson is “better” and more complex, or more vicious and vigorous, than previously perceived, his thought is also too complex to be hemmed in by the obsessions of his century. My interpretation is, therefore, philological, for I seek to discover the relationship between Emerson’s expression and his intention, to discover the spirit encrypted in the letter, to do his books the honor of reading between their lines, and to understand Emerson as he understood himself. As a writer, Emerson sought what all writers seek: to realize his intention in language and to makes his texts embodiments of that intention. I seek to discover and disclose what Emerson means and means to do (the illocutionary and perlocutionary intentions and effects of his locutions), not what he means or has meant to fans, readers, and devoted scholars. My method, therefore, is not appreciative. If it does not focus on how Emerson’s writings help us understand ourselves today as individuals, Americans, intellectuals, reformers, or nature enthusiasts, it is because, as I argue, Emerson was not interested in such