There’s a treacherously placed bookstore in my
neighborhood. To go almost anywhere from my apartment, I have to pass Walden
Pond Books, and it’s next door to my usual coffee shop, so even if I didn’t
decide to go in on the first pass, I probably will on the second. Many of the
references in my own book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention
Economy, are ones that I encountered here, in books like Braiding
Sweetgrass, Spell of the Sensuous, and The Genius of
Birds. The influence is so strong that when I see my book at Walden Pond, I
think of it as a mushroom that grew in the store.
This past October, I found myself in the store looking
at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays.
Not having read much Emerson before, even as an English major, I was quickly
drawn into his writing about time and perception: nature was a “mutable cloud,
which is always and never the same,” and the task was to “[detect] through the
fly, through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the
egg, the constant individual; through countless individuals, the fixed species,
through many species, the genus; through all genera, the steadfast type,
through all the kingdoms of organized life, the eternal unity.” There was an
acid-trip quality to it that I both recognized and admired.
Reading
Emerson’s essays did not feel like reading other books. Later, when I tried to
describe the experience to a friend, I asked, “Have you ever read a book that
made you feel, like, drunk?” Emerson’s aphorisms are forceful, his cadences
dizzying, his appeal to individual will seductive. Normally I am an orderly,
chapter-per-day kind of reader, using up a pack of Post-it flags and then
typing up the important quotes later. But my copy of Emerson’s Essays has only
one Post-it flag, in the introduction by Douglas Crase (an Emerson quote: “It
seems the one lesson which this miraculous world has to teach us, to the
sacred, to stand aloof, and suffer no man and no custom, no mode of thinking to
intrude upon us and bereave us of our infinitude”). After that, I lost my
bearings. I was always just somewhere in the book, underlining and circling,
hunched over, my face too close to the page.
I had
been primed for Emerson’s vision of transcendence. A month earlier, I’d taken
my yearly trip to the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, just
north of Monterey, California. My ostensible purpose was to see the migrating
shorebirds—including the sandpipers whose murmurous flocks contain more than a
little of the transcendental—but it was also just to recover and hear myself
think. I had never been much of a public person, and I’d been caught off-guard
by the publicity around How to Do Nothing. I was soon buried under the pile of
obligations and opinions that followed. At times, it felt like I no longer knew
what my book was about, or what it was that I actually thought. I felt
desperate for some kind of clarity.
After
roaming the hills at Elkhorn Slough until the preserve closed at 5, I decided
impulsively against going straight home. Instead I drove due east and, even
though it was 100 degrees and I’d already been walking all day, started up a
steep trail near Fremont Peak in San Juan Bautista. I was propelled by more
than mere curiosity; I was trying to leave something behind. There was an
unforgiving quality to the dry and tree-less hillside, with a hot wind that
drew a rasping, rattling sound from the pods of alien-looking milk vetches.
Both literally and figuratively, I felt I was gasping for air. When I reached
the top of the trail, the sun was beginning to set on the Diablo Range across
the valley, casting it in an otherworldly shade of purple. I was filled with a
volatile mix of emotions. Sweat evaporating, I wrote in my notebook that “the
pain I feel is the will trying to act” and that “the real self, let out of the
cage, doesn’t want to go back in again.”
The
“will” I wrote of was not exactly mine; it was an artist’s will, an
out-of-range frequency to be listened for with great effort. Emerson’s Essays
addressed and galvanized this self-as-listener, especially in “The Over-Soul.”
I felt drawn to his theological model of self-abandonment and visitation, not
unlike the way the writer Simone Weil described love and attention, or the way
the painter Agnes Martin would wait, alone for days and weeks, for a vision of
perfection. Emerson writes, “The soul gives itself, alone, original, and pure,
to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits,
leads, and speaks through it.” I recognized my own longing for absolute
clarity, my own breathless hike, in Emerson’s description of an “ascension of
state,” where “[w]ith each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the
visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspired and expires its
air.”
“The
Over-Soul” is my favorite essay, but Emerson is better known for “Self Reliance,”
that famous paean to individualism. This is the one where Emerson declares that
“[w]hoso would be a man must be nonconformist,” and disdains society as “a
join-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his
bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.”
Again, the writing is seductive. For anyone adrift in the world, it is
reassuring to hear that “[n]othing can bring you peace but yourself,” or that
mental will can triumph over fate. It can really be this simple: “In the Will
work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit
hereafter out of fear from her rotations.”
I was
far from immune to this essay. I underlined “the great man is he who in the
midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
But the more I looked back on it, the more I began to wrestle with the essay’s
blind spot. I didn’t immediately see it, because the blind spot was also my
own.
The wrestling
started when I went home for Thanksgiving. My family gatherings are small: my
parents, my uncle, and I gather in my grandmother’s house, which is part of a
community of small houses for the elderly. This year, as soon as we walked in
the door, I was confronted with a dilemma. My mother immediately joined my
grandma in the kitchen, whereas my dad went down the hall to a room where my
uncle was sitting. When I asked my mom if they needed help in the kitchen, she
shooed me away, so I headed down the narrow hallway to hover on the periphery
of a conversation about the upcoming election primaries. This division will be
all too familiar to many: women working in the kitchen, men talking politics in
the next room.
As I
leaned awkwardly against the wall because there wasn’t a third chair, the
conversation continued as if I weren’t there. My gaze wandered over to an
interesting tableau across the room. Resting on a shelf was something I’d never
noticed: a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, that favorite novel of
libertarians. The main character is an uncompromising, iconoclastic, and self-made
modernist architect who shared Emerson’s disdain for society and certainly
followed his advice, to “suffer no man and no custom, no mode of thinking to
intrude upon you and bereave you of your infinitude.”
Next to
The Fountainhead was a careful pencil drawing of a black-headed gull in a
frame. After staring at it for a few moments, I finally recognized this drawing
as my own. I wondered why I would have drawn my grandmother a black-headed
gull, an East Coast bird that I’d likely never seen, and then realized that I
had drawn it years ago, before I had become a birder. I had likely been looking
for a pleasant and generic subject for a drawing, googled “seagull,” and drawn
one of the results, without distinguishing among them. (There’s technically no
such thing as a “seagull,” only different kinds of gulls.)
Unexpectedly,
everything congealed in that moment: the different rooms, the drawing, The
Fountainhead, “Self Reliance,” and the critiques I had seen of How to Do
Nothing. Just as I had studiously reproduced the form of the gull without
knowing what it was, I saw that I had absorbed from my family and my upbringing
a specific brand of individualism, valorizing and transmitting it unknowingly.
I’d done this throughout my entire life, but especially in How to Do Nothing.
Around my favored versions of contemplative solitude, so similar to Emerson’s,
a whole suite of circumstances appeared in full relief, like something coming
into focus. The women in the kitchen made the mens’ conversation possible, just
as my trip to the mountain—and really all of my time spent walking, observing,
and courting the “over-soul”—rested upon a long list of privileges, from the
specific (owning a car, having the time), to the general (able-bodied,
upper-middle-class, half white and half “model minority,” a walkable
neighborhood in a desirable city, and more). There was an entire infrastructure
around my experience of freedom, and I’d been so busy chasing it that I hadn’t
seen it.
Just the
night before, I had watched Astra Taylor’s Examined Life, a series of
interviews in different locations with contemporary philosophers. While the
documentary’s other subjects appear alone, Judith Butler takes a walk around
the Mission District of San Francisco with Sunaura Taylor, an activist for
disability and animal rights. Taylor was born with arthrogryposis and uses a
wheelchair. At one point, Butler says, “I’m just thinking that … nobody goes
for a walk without there being something that supports that walk outside of
ourselves. And that maybe we have a false idea that the able-bodied person is
somehow radically self-sufficient.”
Taylor,
whose condition affects the use of her hands, tells Butler about the time she
lived in Brooklyn and would have to sit in a park for hours psyching herself up
to get coffee alone. “In a way it’s a political protest for me to go in and
order a coffee and demand help,” she says, “simply because, in my opinion, help
is something that we all need.” After they stop into a vintage store to get
Taylor a sweater because it’s gotten chilly, Butler revisits this story:
My sense is that what’s at stake here is
really rethinking the human as a site of interdependency. And I think, you
know, when you walk into the coffee shop … and you ask for the coffee, or you,
indeed, even ask for assistance with the coffee, you’re basically posing the
question, do we or do we not live in a world in which we assist each other? Do
we or do we not help each other with basic needs? And are basic needs there to
be decided on as a social issue and not just my personal, individual issue or
your personal, individual issue? So there’s a challenge to individualism that
happens at the moment in which you ask for some assistance with the coffee cup.
And hopefully, people will take it up and say, yes, I, too, live in that world
… in which I understand that we need each other in order to address our basic
needs. And I want to organize a social, political world on the basis of that
recognition.
This
conversation came back to me in that little house at Thanksgiving. My
grandmother, otherwise healthy, had been recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
After we all assembled in the living room, she showed me the medical alert
device (also known as a “panic button”) hanging around her neck, and pointed to
a small console in the corner of the room that would contact my parents if she
pressed the button. Weeks earlier, she had fallen in this same living room and,
unable to move or reach the phone, lay on the floor for many hours until my dad
came by for his regular visit.
My
immediate reaction to her story and to the button was one of terror at the
contingency of the whole thing. It made my grandma seem uniquely dependent. But
as I reflected on the panic button in the context of Butler’s “challenge to
individualism,” it began to look more like an advanced, concrete version of an
interdependence that we each bear in some form from the moment we are born. If
my grandma was now hanging on by this particular thread, it simply highlighted
the many other threads that keep us all aloft. It was also an intense physical
illustration of the way that freedom is constrained by factors outside of one’s
control—the very “wheel of Chance” Emerson thought we could afford to ignore.
In 1930,
James Truslow Adams, the writer who coined the term “American dream,” wrote an
essay called “Emerson Re-read,” in which he tried to account for why Emerson’s
essays enchanted him as a youth but felt hollow for him as an adult. This image
of independence just feels too easy, he says, noting that “economic evils
trouble our sage not at all.” Adams suggests that Emerson’s self-reliance was
part of an optimistic current in American thought that went hand in hand with
material abundance and westward expansion. Indeed, “Self Reliance” was written
five years before the term “manifest destiny” was coined, an era that
celebrated the lone, able explorer setting out to tame a (supposed) wilderness.
The contemplative tradition has often been supported from the outside, a
hallmark of the affordances of leisure—the way that philosophy in ancient
Greece was dependent on a servant class. The concept of self-reliance has
always relied on something else.
None of
this is to say that “Self Reliance” isn’t useful as a model of refusal and
commitment. In his own time, Emerson was an outspoken opponent of slavery, the
Mexican-American War, and the removal of Native Americans from their land. In
our time, we could surely use the reminders to examine our relationship with
public opinion and to maintain a sense of principled intuition. The best
version of Emerson’s individualism is bracing, like a splash of cold water to
the face, or a friend shaking you by the shoulders in order to snap you out of
a daze. But for me, as for many others, everything outside the self fades away
too quickly in “Self Reliance”: all of the people and circumstances that have
influenced my experience of independence, my conception of my self, and even
the very terms with which I think. It hides the losses that appear as my gains.
And by placing the will so high above circumstance, it projects an untruthful
image of equal opportunity in which the unfortunate should have just tried
harder.
The
tensions between agency and situation, between the individual and the
collective, have never been easy to resolve. I’m trying to learn to live in the
messy space between. Here, you can be both your own and not your own,
responsible to communities without exhibiting the dreaded groupthink, and bound
by one commitment: to examine your commitments, forever. Sometimes—many
times—I’m wrong. And when I am, that is a time for listening to others, not for
“keep[ing] with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” I’m reminded
of an archaic form of the noun “reliance,” where it means the opposite of a
dependent; a reliance was someone on whom you depended. When I examine my
identity, I do see an inalienable spirit grasping for infinity. But in the very
same place, I also see an intersection of historical and cultural vectors, held
up by a web of countless reliances.
When Emerson writes that “[t]houghts come into
our minds by avenues which we never left open, and … go out of minds through
avenues which we never voluntarily opened,” it almost sounds like he’s
describing that day at Walden Pond Books, when the Essays found
their way into my unsuspecting hands. I think of my book-mushroom growing
there, the “flower and fruitage” of my encounters so far. It’s a story that
belongs both to me and to my reliances. I will keep coming back to the store,
retreating to the mountain, having conversations, sitting alone, tracing a path
that is more a spiral than a straight line. And hard as I might work, I will be
anything but self-made.
The Myth
of Self-Reliance. By Jenny Odell. The Paris Review, January 15, 2020
During
Harvard University’s commencement week in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson took the
podium at the annual meeting of the Phi Beta Kappa society. The group, composed
of the top students in the graduating class, was gathered in the First Parish
Church in Cambridge. Emerson, the class poet of his own Harvard class a decade
before, and a writer and philosopher of growing stature, had been chosen as the
honored guest to address the future intellectual elite of New England.
The
event was a capstone in a week of ceremony and tradition. That changed when
Emerson began to speak.
In his
speech, titled “The American Scholar,” Emerson called for the young country to
develop a national intellectual life distinct from lingering colonial
influences. He also delivered an incisive critique of his audience, condemning
academic scholarship for its reliance on historical and institutional wisdom.
The eponymous scholar, he argued, had become “decent, indolent, complaisant.”
To become more than “a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's
thinking,” a scholar must begin to engage with the world for oneself.
Emerson
was an unlikely critic of the country’s intellectual establishment. The son of
a Unitarian minister, he had attended Harvard Divinity School and taken a
position after graduation as a junior pastor at Boston’s Second Church. But the
loss of his young wife to tuberculosis shortly after his ordination—just 16
months into their marriage—had shaken the foundation of his faith, and he had
begun to chafe against the restrictions of institutionalized knowledge.
A
similar frustration with New England’s dominant religious and academic culture
was growing among many of the region’s other young intellectuals. In 1836,
Emerson had joined a handful of them in founding the Transcendental Club. As
Emerson laid out in his essay “Nature,” published the same year the club began,
the transcendentalists sought freedom from the “poetry and philosophy of …
tradition” and “religion by … history.” They believed that moral truth should
be sought not in accepted wisdom, but through individual thought and
experience.
With
“The American Scholar,” Emerson gave voice to the movement’s individualism:
envisioning an independent American intellectual culture premised not on any
kind of nationalist pride—nor on any particular doctrine or political
system—but on a dedication to independence itself. He would later define the “American
idea” he sought to promote through his work simply as “Emancipation.”
The
speech elicited praise from many of Emerson’s fellow transcendentalists and
anger from the Harvard administration; after giving a similarly critical
address at the divinity school the following year, he was banned from speaking
on campus for three decades.
But “The
American Scholar” had made its mark. Emerson’s speech left a particular
impression on two members of the Harvard community, a troublemaking
undergraduate named James Russell Lowell and a recent alumnus named Oliver
Wendell Holmes.
“The
Puritan revolt had made us ecclesiastically and the Revolution politically
independent, but we were still socially and intellectually moored to English
thought,” Lowell later wrote, “till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance
at the dangers and the glories of blue water.”
Holmes
called the speech America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.”
Emerson’s
appeal for cultural independence coincided with the nationwide struggle toward
another kind of emancipation. As transcendentalism began to take root in New
England, abolitionism was gaining fervor across the Northern states. The debate
over slavery seeped into churches, literature, and colleges, dominating
conversations about America’s future.
Though
he was initially hesitant to speak publicly about slavery, by the 1840s Emerson
came to believe that American culture could be used to advance the cause of
emancipation. He wasn’t alone: His view was shared by many other
transcendentalists and prominent New England abolitionists. In May 1857, he convened
at the Parker House Hotel in Boston with several of them, including Lowell,
Holmes, and the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Together they founded a
magazine dedicated to advocating abolitionism and promoting American voices:
The Atlantic Monthly.
The
mission statement printed in the first issue of The Atlantic that November
echoed Emerson’s expansive philosophy. The founders disavowed prejudice and
promised to “be the organ of no party or clique,” and to pursue morality and
truth no matter where they stemmed from or led to. They sought too to advance
American writing and the “American idea” “wherever the English tongue is spoken
or read”—a reflection of Emerson’s desire for a national intellectual identity
that could transcend the country’s institutions and borders.
In his
earlier work, Emerson had emphasized the importance of great American writers
who could offer insight into national life and introduce readers to new moral
truths. “We love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode or
in an action or in looks and behavior has yielded us a new thought,” he wrote
in 1844. “He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene.” He saw the same
potential in The Atlantic. He backed Lowell for the role of founding editor,
believing that he would act as an effective guide for the publication rather
than pander to its readers.
He also
supported the choice to exclude bylines from early issues of The Atlantic,
explaining, “The names of contributors will be given out when the names are
worth more than the articles.” In fact, the magazine included the work of some
of the nation’s most notable literary figures, many of them connected to
Emerson through his work and his carefully cultivated intellectual circles.
As his
influence had grown as a writer and lecturer, Emerson had helped inspire and
support some of the 19th century’s best-known American writers. Primary among
these young protégés was Henry David Thoreau, whom Emerson befriended in the
late 1830s. He introduced Thoreau to transcendentalist ideas, encouraged him to
begin writing journal entries and essays, and provided him land with which to
conduct his experiment in simple living. In 1840, Emerson urged another friend
and protégé, the journalist and women’s-rights activist Margaret Fuller, to
publish Thoreau’s first essay in the Transcendental Club’s magazine, The Dial
(a publication that Emerson also helped establish). Following Thoreau’s early
death, in 1862, Emerson helped champion Walden and secure the book and its
author vaunted positions in the pantheon of American literature.
In 1842,
Emerson gave a lecture appealing for a distinctly American writer who could
give voice to the yet “unsung” nation. In attendance was a 22-year-old Walt
Whitman, who was determined to answer his call. “I was simmering, simmering,
simmering,” Whitman later said. “Emerson brought me to a boil.”
In 1855,
Whitman paid for his first collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass, to be printed
at a local shop, and sent one of the first copies to Emerson. Emerson responded
soon after with a laudatory letter. “I find it the most extraordinary piece of
wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed,” he wrote.
Inspired
by the positive response, Whitman passed Emerson’s letter on to an editor at
the New York Tribune and quickly paid to produce a second edition of Leaves of
Grass. He printed a phrase from Emerson’s letter on the book’s spine: “I greet
you at the beginning of a great career.”
Early
issues of The Atlantic featured Whitman’s poetry and Thoreau’s essays, along
with short stories from Louisa May Alcott, the daughter of Emerson’s close
friend Bronson Alcott; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emerson’s neighbor in Concord,
Massachusetts; and Henry James, a friend of Emerson’s by way of his father. The
community he had created would help establish the new magazine, and further his
vision for a generation of American writers who could put the spirit of the
young country into words.
Emerson’s
vision of emancipation shone through in the magazine’s approach to slavery,
women’s rights, and labor rights, among other topics, in the years that he
served as a regular contributor. He himself became a leading voice for
abolitionism in The Atlantic as the country entered the Civil War, making a
passionate moral case that the nation could not survive unless slavery was
extinguished.
In one
of his most famous lectures, “American Civilization,” published in the
magazine’s April 1862 issue, he reiterated his call for independence from the
past. “America is another word for Opportunity,” he observed. “Our whole
history appears like a last effort of the Divine Providence in behalf of the
human race; and a literal slavish following of precedents, as by a justice of
the peace, is not for those who at this hour lead the destinies of this
people.”
He
beseeched the government to abolish slavery immediately and permanently. After
Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation
six months later, Emerson hailed the measure as a “heroic” and “genius” step
forward in the long fight for moral governance—a fight that would not end when
slavery did, but that would continue to march toward ever greater political
liberty.
In other
essays for the magazine, he urged readers to seek their own freedom outside the
bounds of politics. A measure of individual solitude, he wrote, was necessary
for the endurance of society. He argued that power was derived from wisdom, and
wisdom from the accumulation of personal experience. And the best personal
experience was to be found walking in nature alone: nature that “kills egotism
and conceit; deals strictly with us; and gives sanity.” Out of nature, he
believed, could grow good and wise men; out of good and wise men, perhaps, a
good and wise nation.
Published
over the course of 50 years, his dozens of essays, poems, and lectures in The
Atlantic were an encapsulation of the same vision of independence that he’d
outlined in “The American Scholar” and that had, by the time he co-founded the
magazine, earned him international recognition.
But
while Emerson’s work was widely read in his time, none of his writing for The
Atlantic—nor the hundreds of other essays, lectures, poems, and books he
produced over the course of his career—has endured as popular reading in the
way of contemporaneous works like Alcott’s Little Women or Whitman’s “Song of
Myself.” The selections from Emerson’s expansive body of work that have found
places on modern syllabi or in anthologies are, in the way of most literary
classics, more often referenced than read. He remains perhaps one of the most
cited American authors, but his words surface now mainly in the form of
decontextualized aphorisms and inspirational quotes: “To be great is to be
misunderstood,” or “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”
Reading
Emerson’s essays, it’s not hard to understand why his words have found their
most enduring currency in this form. As the literary critic Alfred Kazin
observed in a July 1957 Atlantic article, “Emerson’s genius is in the sudden
flash rather than in the suavely connected paragraph and page.”
His
writing, on the scale of pithy phrases—or even of paragraphs or brief
sections—can be eloquent, clear, moving. On the scale of whole works, however,
he charts convoluted, snaking routes toward his point. He overuses rhetorical
questions; he tends toward rambling tangents; he dwells overlong on obscure
concepts and metaphors; he becomes mired in dense, verbose passages that are at
best tangential to his core ideas.
And his
ideas were often as convoluted as his writing. He enshrined individualism,
urging readers to “trust thyself” rather than being drawn in by “the lustre of
the firmament of bards and sages” or relying “on Property, or the … governments
which protect it.” But he dismissed the idea of deep or lasting individuality,
insisting that truth was ultimately universal and “within man is the soul of
the whole … the eternal ONE.” He argued that society suppressed liberty and
that “the less government we have, the better.” But he also asserted that
“government exists to defend the weak and the poor and the injured party,” and
called for the state to promote virtue and to protect and secure individual
rights. He spoke out against the immorality of slavery and the forced removal
of Native Americans. But he also espoused a belief in absolute racial hierarchy
even decades after he became a vocal abolitionist.
Yet even
these inconsistencies were consistent, in the broadest sense, with Emerson’s
American idea. For him, emancipation was an eternal work in progress—dependent
on an unlimited openness to change, and an endless accrual of new insights and
observations. Over the course of a lifetime, he noted, any single person
accumulates knowledge through successive years of education, experience, and
imagination; over the course of many lifetimes, society en masse incorporates
the knowledge of individuals into a broader understanding of the world. He
regarded perfect understanding as unachievable, so to him, virtue lay not in
achieving it but rather in trying to move closer to it—imperfectly,
inconsistently, humanly, the only way it could be done.
In this
way, his ideas persist at the very heart of American culture, largely
decontextualized from any particular piece of his work.
“Emerson,
by no means the greatest American writer .... is the inescapable theorist of
virtually all subsequent American writing,” the Yale literary critic Harold
Bloom wrote in a 1984 article for The New York Review of Books. “From his
moment to ours, American authors either are in his tradition, or else in a
countertradition originating in opposition to him.”
Even if
Emerson’s most influential lectures and essays are no longer universally read,
the works he helped bring to life—such as Thoreau’s Walden and Whitman’s Leaves
of Grass—endure as cornerstones of the nation’s literature. His essays shaped a
tradition of American essay-writing. His poetry gave rise to some of the
country’s greatest poets: Emily Dickinson treasured a book of his verse; Robert
Frost called him his favorite American poet. Even Hawthorne and Herman
Melville, co-signers of The Atlantic’s founding manifesto who expressed reservations
about the transcendentalist movement—what Melville once, after attending one of
Emerson’s lectures, referred to as “myths and oracular gibberish”—committed a
distinctly Emersonian individualism to the page with characters such as Hester
Prynne and Captain Ahab.
Transcendentalism
went on to inform subsequent generations of philosophical and religious
thought, including the existential musings of Friedrich Nietzsche and the civil
disobedience of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Though Emerson never
ventured into the visual arts, he influenced the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe
and the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.
“Great
men,” Emerson wrote, “exist that there may be greater men.” So he set out to
build a culture that could evolve beyond any one moment or person, even
himself.
Emerson’s
house in Concord is surrounded by more famous historical sites. About a mile to
the north lies the reconstructed bridge where one of the first battles of the
American Revolution was fought in 1775. To the south stretches the northern
shore of Walden Pond, where Thoreau retreated to “live deliberately” for two
years, beginning in the summer of 1845.
Between
them, the boxy white house rises up from the edge of the Cambridge Turnpike
like an afterthought, an unremarkable Federal-style structure distinguished
from its neighbors only by two neat signs proclaiming it to be “The Home of
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.” Of the hundreds of thousands of visitors who traveled to
the town in 2018 seeking some insight into the nation’s history—and some
resplendent fall foliage—just 3,000 stopped by to see the home.
Emerson
purchased the house in 1835, in the early stages of his new career as a writer
and lecturer. When he first moved in, he set out to cultivate a garden. He
planted hemlocks when his oldest son was born; pine trees after delivering “The
American Scholar”; a fruit orchard as his first collection of essays launched
him into international fame.
“I am
present at the sowing of the seed of the world,” he wrote in 1841. More than a
century and a half later, by the side of the Cambridge Turnpike, some of the
things he planted still grow.
“Listen
to me! . . . Do not, above all confound
me with what I am not.” Friedrich
Nietzsche’s plea, of course, was in vain. Even while alive but in a state of
complete mental collapse, his sister began an egregious misappropriation of his
writings. She cultivated and perpetrated
readings of Nietzsche sympathetic to German nationalism and anti-Semitism. This
“German Nietzsche” as the avatar of the Aryan superman has generally collapsed,
and after the fall of the Third Reich a reassessment of Nietzsche began.
In the
latter part of the 20th century a wholly new interpretation has emerged.
Nietzsche has become the avatar of a world without God and the prophet of
postmodern relativism. In a great feat of intellectual alchemy, Nietzschean
skepticism has been fused with Marxist social consciousness to produce
Progressive gold. What Harold Bloom
calls “French Nietzsche” has swept through Academia and is now in its latter
orthodoxical iterations.
Nietzsche
has been described as a philosopher who is easy to read but difficult to
understand. This is, at least in part, because of his seemingly fragmented and
provocative aphoristic style and his disinclination to articulate any kind of
philosophical system. He often appears to contradict himself, and he makes no
attempt to reconcile his seemingly disparate views. Nietzsche as philosopher
is, therefore, difficult to place into any kind of historical continuity and,
in fact, he himself is often critical if not dismissive of the great
philosophers of his age: Jean Jacques
Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, John Stewart Mill, Arthur Schopenhauer, and so on. At
some point, many end up on the barb of his ruthless wit. And Nietzsche never
even mentions Karl Marx by name, while routinely denouncing the emergent
socialistic movements as resentful secular Christian heresies. Nietzsche has
little unqualified good to say about individual modern philosophers—save one:
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Nietzsche
loved Emerson from first to last. Nietzsche’s interest in and admiration of
Emerson began when he was still a schoolboy and continued throughout his
productive life. He studiously annotated and copied whole passages from German
translations of Emerson’s essays. In 1884, Nietzsche described Emerson as, “a
glorious, great nature, rich in soul and spirit” and pronounced Emerson to be,
“the author who has been the richest in ideas in this century.”And commenting
on a collection of Emerson’s essays, Nietzsche wrote: “Never have I felt so at
home in a book, and in my home, as—I may not praise it, it is too close to
me.”
Nietzsche’s
admiration of Emerson has been largely ignored by modern scholars, at least
until quite recently. My own contention is simply this: understanding
Nietzsche’s affinity for Emerson is not only essential in understanding
Nietzsche, but it is a way of confronting our current psychological
fragmentation and ideological isolationism.
Nietzsche’s
identification with Emerson is elemental. Both Emerson and Nietzsche subscribe
to a unified Heraclitan universe of perpetual change and conflict, what
Nietzsche describes as a, “monster of energy
. . . eternally self-creating . . . eternally self-destroying,” a vast
“play of contradictions” in what Emerson describes as a “series of balanced antagonisms.”
This is Emerson’s “power and form,” Nietzsche’s “Dionysian and Apollonian,” or
what he would eventually call “will to power.” A human being is then a force of
nature, what Emerson calls, “a piece of the universe made alive” and human
thinking, human consciousness itself is a natural phenomenon. All human ideas
are expressions of various human life forms, and philosophy is essentially what
Nietzsche calls, “a kind of atavism of the highest order.”And like all forms,
human cultures and civilizations are sublimations of this paradoxical play of
contrary and conflicting powers.
Both
Nietzsche and Emerson emphasize the importance and integrity of the individual.
This is not for some ideological or romantic reason but because it is only as
individuals that we can know who we are and how reality works. “Nothing,” says
Emerson, “is at last sacred, but the integrity of your own mind.” The
individual is the locus of experience, and Nietzsche and Emerson are, above
all, the most empirical of philosophers. What we can elementally know of
reality we know firsthand as individuals, not as members of some group, nor by
some explanation of reality received from others. What we can most importantly
receive from others is not “instruction,” says Emerson, but “provocation”—and
provocation is precisely what Nietzsche receives from Emerson.
Emerson,
not unlike Nietzsche, articulates no systematic philosophy; he has no
particular theory of history or of social or economic relations. “Life,” for Emerson “is not intellectual or
critical, but sturdy.” Emerson understands human thinking as the absorption of
sense experience and its transformation by individual human consciousness, by
what he calls “the fire of his mind.” Ideas are not merely human projections
but experience transformed by the fire of thought; thinking is not so much the
generation of ideas as it is the combustion of experience.
Nietzsche
and Emerson are minds on fire; both inhabit a world of what Emerson calls
“perpetual revelation.” “We stand before the secret of the world,” writes
Emerson, “where Being passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety.” In such a
dynamic understanding of reality, truth cannot so much be known, as it can be
experienced or embodied. It is the scholar’s conceit to think of Nietzsche and
Emerson as simply generating ideas and concepts to be analyzed by others.
We are,
as Vedic thinkers have long affirmed, simultaneously observers and participants
in reality; “We animate what we can,” says the “Hindoo of Concord,” “and we see
only what we animate.” The nature of the reality we experience reflects the
nature of who we are. This understanding of ourselves as simultaneously
observers and participants is a key to understanding Nietzsche’s affinity with
Emerson and key to understanding subsequent misreadings of both. Existence is
neither a purely objective phenomenon nor a purely subjective one—but a dynamic
of inner and outer forces. Existence is a poetic phenomenon.
As
powerful and helpful as human concepts are, we always risk being seduced by our
own “ideals” (or, for Nietzsche, “idols”) and drawn away from what Nietzsche
calls “reality as it is.” Emerson, from his seminal essay “Experience”:
“The great gifts are not got by analysis . .
. We may climb into the thin and cold
realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of
sensation. Between these extremes is the
equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry, – a narrow belt.”
Living on
the equator of life is dealing with Nietzsche’s reality as it is, and it is the
poet who best understands that we are creative beings in a creative universe.
The poet, Emerson asserts, “stands among partial men for the complete man.” It
is the poet who has the greatest power to “name” the world and who articulates
and affirms the unity of seemingly antagonistic aspects. Fully understanding
the limits of skepticism and analysis and the necessity of creativity is why
Nietzsche refers to himself as, “an artistic Socrates.” Philosophizing itself
is a creative act.
Understanding
and accepting the poetic nature of existence requires accepting and confronting
the limited nature of human knowledge. This is Nietzsche’s “tragic insight” or
“tragic wisdom,” which is the most elemental truth of our existence. Tragic
insight acknowledges ourselves as simultaneously observers and participants in
reality. Simply analyzing or observing nature no matter how closely will not
relieve us of our responsibility to confront paradoxical reality. We may break
down reality into its pieces, but ultimately we live by wholes not parts; it is
we who generate order and meaning from our experience.
It is
precisely this human tendency to shrink from the poetic and tragic nature of
existence and to confuse our ideas or interpretations of reality with reality,
which informs both Emerson’s and Nietzsche’s criticisms of Christianity. But even before Emerson’s controversial
“Divinity School Address” at Harvard in 1838, Christianity as a whole
comprehensive system, especially in Europe, was in decline. It would be
Nietzsche, almost a half century later, who would best articulate the nature
and consequences of this world historical event. Nietzsche would become the
prophet of the death of God and the emergence of a kind of human being new to
human history: the shallow, nihilistic last man.
When
Emerson died in 1882, America was still somewhat of a frontier society, in Walt
Whitman’s words, “a great poem” yet in the process of writing itself. Well into
the twentieth century Emerson would come to seen as the philosopher of sunny
optimism and individual self-realization, ultimately ignored or dismissed in
the world of academic philosophy.
Nietzsche’s
Europe of this time was still an expanding imperial power, but it was also
experiencing the beginnings of what would become its own civilizational
disintegration. Nietzsche would become famous for his insights into the great
transformations, which have come to define the modern world. He is, to this
day, the “bad boy” of European philosophy, variously condemned by some as the
prophet of decay and nihilism, while praised by others as the avatar of ferment
and liberation. All the while, Nietzsche’s debt to Emerson has largely been forgotten.
Understanding
the nature of Nietzsche’s affinity for Emerson is to return to the powerful and
persistent relevance of both. It is precisely the neglected Emersonian aspect
of Nietzsche which signifies a return to observing and contemplating the
spectacle of reality as a whole, as a vast unified play of forces of which we
are always participants. A return to Emerson is a return to the integrity of
the individual as the locus of experience and a turn away from our narrow,
fragmented and increasingly dysfunctional ideologies and abstractions. A return
to Emerson is a return to philosophy, a return to faith in our ability, not
only to contemplate antagonistic forces, but to articulate how antagonistic
forces interconnect and how we fit into the whole tragic spectacle.
Nietzsche’s
respect and admiration for Emerson persisted throughout his entire life because
Nietzsche’s fundamental understanding of reality persisted: we are tragic
beings in tragic universe. Commenting on the passing of Emerson, Nietzsche
wrote: “In Emerson, we have lost a philosopher”
Nietzsche’s
First Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson. By Chris Augusta. Merion West , May 21, 2019.
No comments:
Post a Comment