American Literature I Professor Cyrus R. K. Patell Lecture Fourteen: Emerson (II) New York University
Names and Terms
John Locke: life, liberty, and estate C. B. Macpherson: possessive individualism
Points to Remember
• Emerson's “self-reliance” as a social philosophy. • Emerson's embrace of contradiction: “Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? ... A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do” (p. 1168). • Emerson's emphasis on process: “Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes” (p. 1172).
“The American Scholar” and “Self-Reliance”
• Emerson’s adversary is fear; his lectures and essays have the therapeutic goal of developing in his audience a sense of egoism strong enough to resist its crippling influence. He calls this sense of egoism “self-reliance.” • Emerson and process: the scholar as “Man Thinking.” • Note Emerson’s use of synecdoche and metonymy in “The American Scholar” (p. 1139). In what ways does Emerson anticipate Karl Marx’s critiques of capitalist society (as well as Georg Lukacs on “reification”)? For further thought: where do Emerson and Marx part ways? How, for example, would we compare the ways in which Emerson and Marx critique religion? • The later idea of the “representative man,” foreshadowed in “The American Scholar”: see p. 1147. (Emerson as one of Nietzsche's inspirations.) • On American culture: “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe” (p. 1150). • Emerson's goal is the promotion of a uniquely American culture: compare to similar statements by earlier writers in the course. • “Self-Reliance”: a similar indictment of American culture for its sycophantic tendencies; see, for example, the last paragraph on p. 1171. • Emerson’s depiction of the relationship between self and society in these essays: neither truly dialectical nor truly oppositional: rather, complementary and sequential, and follows the logic of laissez-faire, with one emendation: it is driven not by the pursuit of wealth but by the pursuit of individuality. • In what ways does Emerson, like Jefferson, depart from Locke? In what ways does Emerson depart from Jefferson? See, for example, p. 1165: “Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each Patell / American Literature I / Lecture 14 2
shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.” • What is Emerson's attitude toward property? See p. 1179 (last paragraph): “the reliance on Property ...” • Compare Emerson's project to Winthrop's, particularly their different conceptions of “self” and “society.” Compare the fable of the “One Man” (p. 1138) to Winthrop’s idea of being “knit together . . . as one man . . . members of the same body.”
• From “Self-Reliance” to “Experience”: we seem to experience a fall, a loss, a failure of confidence. We seem to move from “self-trust” to “self-doubt.” The opening of the essay embodies a standpoint that is troubled both by a sense of belatedness and a radical skepticism about human epistemology. (Compare the beginning of the essay to one of Poe’s tales.) • Critics generally attribute the skepticism and gloom that seem to hang over the essay to the fact that it was written after the death of Emerson’s son Waldo. The essay explores the numbness that Emerson finds himself feeling. • Consider the way in which Emerson describes his grief over Waldo’s death (p. 1197):
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.
• “Experience” offers a gloomy and skeptical version of the individualism that animates Nature, “The American Scholar,” and “Self-Reliance”: each of us is an individual, whose identity is formed outside of social bonds and material possessions. In what ways might this be said to follow the Puritan logic of conversion: from faith through combat and doubt to true, imperfect assurance? Does this bear out Melville’s assertion in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” that the “Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin” is a force “from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free”? • Page 1207: “It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us.” Emerson here anticipates Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Louis Althusser’s definition of ideology, and Karl Mannheim’s so-called “paradox,” all of which point to the unreliability of human vision and the untenability of the Patell / American Literature I / Lecture 14 3
Cartesian split between subject and object. Compare this account of vision to the “transparent eyeball” passage in Nature. • The compensation for the inescapability of this “mediated” subjectivity: the truth that we had hoped to find in “reality” we find instead in ourselves, in our “souls.”
For Further Thought
• Note Emerson’s strategy in addressing social questions: shifting the ground of his inquiry from culture and society to the individual. In addition, a heightened level of abstraction, in which the individual, stripped of social markers, is described as “the soul”; the human “mind” becomes something timeless and universal; and the concept of power is sanitized, disconnected from its functions in the world of politics, and grounded in the individual. What are the benefits of this strategy? What are its costs? What does it leave it? What might it be incapable of addressing? • In what ways is Thoreau’s work built – both metaphorically and literally – on foundations laid by Emerson? • Think of “Resistance to Civil Government” as Thoreau’s “American Scholar,” of Walden as his Nature. • To what other genres beyond nature-writing does Walden belong? In what ways is it a contribution to political theory? Think of its relation to other genres we have encountered this term: it is at once a “discovery narrative,” complete with the traditional paraphernalia of surveyor’s measurements and lists of plants and animals; a justification of “plantation,” because of its descriptions of the building of a house and the cultivation of the soil; and a personal narrative of conversion.
Today’s Songs
Radiohead, “Prove Yourself” Joan Armatrading, “Me, Myself, I” Madonna, “Express Yourself”