The way of life by abandonment: Emerson's impersonal

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 25, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 1-31

  Cameron, Sharon ^a  

^a Hopkins University   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 66049138056     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/448906     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nominalist and Realist," Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York, 1983), p. 580; hereafter abbreviated "NR."
2. Emerson, "Montaigne," Essays and Lectures, p. 709; hereafter abbreviated "M."
3. see J. Ellis McTaggert on "Personality," in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings, 13 vols. (New York, 1908), 11:773-81. For a historically nuanced account of Emerson's complex relation to individuality, see Sacvan Bercovitch's clarifying discussion of the understanding of individualism Emerson inherited from the socialists, of his reconception of this idea in the 1840s as a "vision of cosmic subjectivity" (opposed to socialism), and of his ultimate understanding in the 1850s of individuality as allied with industrial-capitalist "Wealth"
4. Emerson, "History," Essays and Lectures, p. 237
5. and "Spiritual Laws," Essays and Lectures, p. 322; hereafter abbreviated "SL."
6. All major critics of Emerson have understood that if one threat to self-reliance is conformity, the other is petty self-interest or self-cherishing. See, for instance, Barbara Packer's discussion of self-reliance and self-abandonment (self-reliance, in Packer's account, rests not on "persons but powers") (B. L. Packer, Emerson's Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays [New York, 1982], p. 143);
7. Harold Bloom's analysis of the dialectical relation between an "Apollonian Self-Reliance" and a "Dionysian influx," the latter often perceptible as ecstatic energy that transforms mere individualism (Harold Bloom, "Emerson and Influence," A Map of Misreading [New York, 1975], p. 166);
8. and Richard Poirier's discussion of genius, as countering the self as a conventionally defined entity, genius being what is not psychological, not moral or political, not stable, indeed not recognizable-rather, to be seen as something "vehicular, transitive, mobile," something performed in writing (Richard Poirier, "The Question of Genius," The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections [New York, 1987], pp. 89-90). I understand Emerson's impersonality to be related to, but not identical with, Poirier's genius, Bloom's energy, Packer's powers, as his corrective to the deformation of personal identity. These terms rely on a Neoplatonic, upward, sublimatory movement away from material particularity, whereas Emerson's impersonal moves in the opposite direction. For in impersonality Emerson is elaborating a paradox that truth to the self involves the discovery of its radical commonness. A recent, important contribution to this debate is George Kateb's Emerson and Self- Reliance ([Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1995]; hereafter abbreviated £5), a book notable on a number of counts. First, he has an excellent discussion of how antagonism and contrast lie at the heart of Emerson's notion of identity. Specifically, Kateb claims that Emerson's selfreliance depends upon an acknowledgment of the otherness and impersonality one might suppose antithetical to it; see ES, p. 17. "Impersonality registers an individual's universality or infinitude" (ES, p. 31). In this registration what is reduced is the "'biographical ego'" and one acts "at the behest of 'the grand spiritual Ego,' at the behest, that is, of one's impersonal reception of the world" (ES, p. 33). Second, Kateb then correctly associates Emerson's impersonality with the religious ("Emerson is ravenously religious. Anything in the world . matters and is beautiful or sublime only if seen and thought of as part of a designed, intentionally coherent totality; indeed as an emanation of divinity" [ES, p. 65]). But, third, Kateb then tries to divorce the idea of the impersonal from the religious (because its piety embarrasses him and because it appears to him that the driving thrust for unity, at the heart of the religious, betrays Emerson's commitment to antagonism). Kateb approves of Emerson's sense of the "interconnectedness" of things; he likes the idea of affinity, but not the idea of an all or a one with which interconnectedness is integral in Emerson's thought. But the very impersonality so crucial to Kateb's explanation of self-reliance is also, I argue below, inseparable from the religiousness from which Kateb would sever it. The radicalness Kateb admires depends upon the "religiousness" that he fears trivializes it. Also central in this context is Stanley Cavell's "Aversive Thinking: Emersonian Representations in Heidegger and Nietzsche," Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of American Perfectionism (Chicago, 1990), pp. 33-63, an earlier, important reading of "Self-Reliance," antagonism, and transfiguration. Cavell understands Emerson's "moral perfectionism" as specifying a structure within the self that requires constant "martyrdom" (p. 56). In other words, in Cavell's analysis of Emerson, as in his reading of Nietzsche, the "higher" self is not elsewhere or other, but is located "within." In this idea of perfectionism the self is not fixed, but neither is it absent. Perfectionism, so defined, supposes a structure essentially more conservative than that of impersonality.
9. Harry Frankfurt, "Identification and Externality," in The Identities of Persons, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley, 1969), p. 242. Frankfurt's preliminary distinction between desires that are external to a self and those that are identified with it revolves around a decision made with respect to these desires (a decision rather than an attitude, for a decision, unlike an attitude, cannot be disowned). See pp. 243-50 for what kind of decision qualifies a desire for being situated outside the person.
10. See Walter Harding, Emerson's Library (Charlottesville, Va., 1967), p. 217.
11. See Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore, 1979).
12. Emerson reimagines something like the idea of the heroic in the presumption of a direct confrontation with the Over-soul, the Superpersonal Heart, the Immeasurable Mind, while in Kant this direct access to something ultimate is epitomized by moral law, possible to realize if all empirical interest is subordinated to it. It's the direct apprehension of something supreme or ultimate that in both cases suggests what might appear a bizarre analogy to the heroic. For an analogous contemporary reimagining of the heroic as defined by the immediacy of encounter with the divine or with an ultimate reality in the human, see Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, ed. Carl Niemeyer(1841; Lincoln, Nebr., 1966).
13. Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Melaphysic of Morals, trans. T. K. Abbott (Amherst, N.Y., 1988), p. 60; hereafter abbreviated FR
14. See, for instance, the last paragraph of "Character" where the language of ownership for what is alien is explicit. Here identifying (in the sense of detecting) "the holy sentiment we cherish" quickly turns into identification with it ("only the pure and aspiring can know its face, and the only compliment they can pay it, is to own it") (Emerson, "Character," pp. 508, 509). Such ownership is understood in terms of a religious discovery.
15. William Ellery Channing, "Unitarian Christianity," "Unitarian Christianity" and Other Essays, ed. Irving H. Bartlett (Indianapolis, 1957), pp. 31, 92, 108.
16. Walt Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," Leaves of Grass (1856; New York, 1980), pp. 144, 149, sec. 1, 9.
17. Emily Dickinson, "Our journey had advanced" (no. 615), Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems, ed. Thomas H.Johnson (New York, 1961), p. 157,11. 1, 11-12.
18. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, 1987), pp. 51, 57. The project in this book is to show the trajectory from "anonymous" existing to subjectivity to the alterity of the other person, an alterity with which time is associated. What interests me about this early work of Levinas is where he locates suffering (as produced by the experience of personal identity) as opposed to where Parfit locates suffering (as produced by relinquishing the idea of personal identity).