Emerson and Us

Understanding Emerson

“The American Scholar” and His Struggle for Self-Reliance

by Kenneth S. Sacks

Princeton University Press, 199 pp., $29.95

THE BICENTENNIAL of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s birth on May 25, 1803, has come and gone, leaving surprisingly little in its wake. The occasion was duly noted. But the observances had a quiet, perfunctory air about them. There was a flurry of local celebrations in his native New England: special tours of his Concord home, conferences and exhibitions at Harvard, lectures at Boston-area Unitarian and theosophical societies, pleasant articles in the Boston Globe, Harvard Magazine, and a few other periodicals. At the elegant Emerson Inn in Rockport, where the master is thought to have vacationed, one could even acquire a bronze bust for $350.

But this admiring sentiment does not seem to have spread much beyond the region or stimulated a more sustained national reflection on his larger legacy. Americans know they’re expected to revere Emerson. But they are not sure quite why. Some are not even sure they should.

The eminent literary scholar Harold Bloom has few doubts on that score. He did his bit for the bicentennial by proclaiming Emerson to be “the dominant sage of the American imagination,” “the central figure in American culture,” a thinker who, far from being a faded tintype stowed away in the national attic, is “closer to us than ever on his two-hundredth birthday.”

Bloom has been promoting Emerson for years now, and such statements, though predictably overblown, have a certain plausibility to them. Still, it’s hard to locate the particular points where Emerson’s influence has been most strongly felt. Bloom finds Emerson popping up in so many places–Richard Rorty, Republicans, libertarians, John Dewey, Henry Ford, Henry James Sr., Pentecostals, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Hart Crane, Robert Frost, George W. Bush–that his vast claims begin to sound meaningless. Where isn’t Emerson?

Yet one sympathizes with Bloom. There is something undeniably large and at the same time ineffable about Emerson’s status in our culture, a quality of being both everywhere and nowhere that is somehow reinforced by his way of doing things: his defiance of conventional categories, and the flowing amorphousness of his highly quotable but rambling and unsystematic style.

He who learns to write in strings of aphorisms has something to offer every attention span, which is why Emerson has appealed to a variety of audiences. He has been held in awe by the nineteenth-century American literati, admired by the likes of Thomas Carlyle and Friedrich Nietzsche, embraced by twentieth-century scholars and intellectuals of nearly every rank and ideological persuasion–and equally so by a long procession of aspiring businessmen, all-American motivational speakers, human-potential psychotherapists, transcendental meditators, and get-rich gurus, all anxious to claim his sanction.

One of his most worshipful twentieth-century admirers was the American composer Charles Ives, a fellow Yankee individualist who not only memorialized Emerson with a movement of his legendarily formidable piano sonata “Concord, Massachusetts, 1845,” but was pleased to introduce advertisements for his life-insurance company, Ives and Myrick, with zingy Emersonian epigrams such as “I appeal from your customs; I must be myself!” (from the famous 1841 essay on “Self-Reliance”). Ives found it natural to embrace Emerson in both ways, even when to our ears they clash resoundingly, like the clanging countermelodies in Ives’s own strange musical compositions.

So, it is not easy to know whether Emerson is best understood as the inspirational poet and prophet of a robustly independent American intellectual life, or as the spiritual father of contemporary narcissism, the über-Protestant who greased the skids from “Here I Stand” (Martin Luther, 1521) to “I’ve Gotta Be Me” (Sammy Davis Jr., 1969). But, as the example of Ives suggests, it may be helpful to start out by thinking of Emerson, first and foremost, as a peculiar product of New England culture, at a particular moment.

A CENTURY AND A HALF AGO, bucolic little Concord was a hub of the American literary and cultural universe, home to a small group of talented intellectuals, major figures in their own day who would go on to exert an incalculable influence on all subsequent American thought and culture. One could hardly think of a more illustrious circle of American writers than Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller. All of them knew one another, lived in or near Concord at roughly the same time, and wrote many of their most important works there. Indeed, all of them (with the exception of Fuller, who died in a shipwreck) are also buried there today. There is perhaps no single location in all of American literary history more weighty in literary lore, and more alive with the sense of possibility–precisely the sense of possibility that has always been one of the chief glories of American life.

These writers shared a fascination with the cluster of ideas and ideals that go under the rubric of Transcendentalism, which stressed the glories of the vast, the mysterious, and the intuitive. It sought to replace the sin-soaked supernaturalist dogma of orthodox Christianity and the tidy rationality of Unitarianism with a sprawling romantic and eclectic form of natural piety that bordered on pantheism. It placed the ideal of the majestic, isolated, and inviolable Self at the center of its thought and the center of Nature itself. Indeed, Nature and the Self were two expressions of the same thing: “Nature is the opposite of the soul,” Emerson wrote in 1837, “answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind.” The vastness of Nature’s external panorama was exactly matched by the vastness of the soul’s interior estate. Both were part and parcel of the Universal Soul that superintended all things.

Needless to say, such a fulsome view of both Nature and subjective experience accorded little or no respect to older sources of commanding human authority and wisdom, except as raw material to be fed upon selectively, with only the needs of the moment (and of the feeding individual) in view. It also was rather sketchy on details of political and social thought. Emerson himself was notoriously contemptuous of “society,” which he disparaged as a “conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members,” and was distrustful of all social movements, even those for undeniably good causes. Instead, he held, the Transcendental Self enjoyed an absolute liberty, free of any external restraint or law other than that of its own nature. In the Transcendental utopia, individuals perfected themselves in unfettered liberty, in order that they might form a community that thrives without authority or traditions. Transcendentalism promoted a social and ethical theory that amounted to little more than the principle of self-trust.

Transcendentalism would have been unthinkable without its many transatlantic additives, including a selective appropriation of German romanticism, a misreading of Kantian idealism, and generous dollops of the Swedish theosophist Emanuel Swedenborg. But it was nonetheless a movement as American, and New England, as apple pie, a movement marking a distinct phase in the strange career of American Puritanism. In Transcendentalism, the anagogical mysticism of Jonathan Edwards was turned loose in an un-Edwardsian universe, one in which Nature had lost its fallen fearsomeness and the sense of sin itself had begun to evaporate. Transcendentalism became the evangelicalism of the New England intelligentsia. Like mainstream evangelicalism, it sought to overthrow the established authority of denominational hierarchies and social elites, and to ground religious affirmations in the authority of individual experience.

To be sure, in taking such a position, it subtracted such inconvenient evangelical distinctives as, say, a belief in the divinity of Christ, in born-again conversion, in the sacred and binding authority of the Bible, and in the imperative to work actively for social reform. It was too free-floating, skeptical, and self-satisfied for any of that. But still, the movement needs to be understood as part and parcel of the expansive, hopeful, experimental, and sometimes utterly cockamamie spirit of antebellum American reform–a moment when America seemed ready to reconsider all existing social arrangements and precedents, and try out everything from abolitionism, feminism, and temperance to diet fads, utopian socialist communities, group marriage, and group celibacy–a moment that has given us such disparate legacies as the revivalistic camp meeting, Seventh-Day Adventism, Mormonism, Shaker furniture, and Graham crackers.

THE SPECIFIC hierarchical establishment against which Transcendentalism was rebelling, though, was Unitarianism, itself an intellectually liberal (though politically conservative) rebellion against the old-line official Calvinism of the Congregational Church, and as idiosyncratic a New England institution as one could ever hope to find. Emerson’s own family had faithfully traced the path of this portion of religious history. Emerson himself was the offspring of a long line of ministers in the Congregational tradition, including his Unitarian father William, whom Emerson followed into the ministry after first attending Unitarian-controlled Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School. Not long after moving into the pulpit, however, Emerson found himself restless and discontented with the airless rationalism and empty formalism of “corpse-cold” Unitarian theology and worship.

One can hardly blame him. Unitarianism, which itself started out as an insurgency, had with amazing speed become a byword for smug complacency. “Nothing,” remarked Henry Adams, who knew that old Bostonian world well, “quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the Unitarian clergy….[They] had solved the universe, or had offered and realized the best solution yet tried. The problem was worked out.” Unitarianism had come to power with the promise of a greater theological freedom than that of hard-shell Calvinism, but failed to deliver on the expectations it had aroused. It would quickly be devoured by the revolution it had engendered.

IN 1832 EMERSON’S RESTLESSNESS finally led him to resign his clerical position at Boston’s prestigious Second Church, even without any clear notion of what was to come next. But a substantial legacy left him by his recently deceased wife Ellen gave him breathing room and a chance to reorder his life. After a period of travel in Europe, in which he met Carlyle, Wordsworth, and some of his other intellectual idols, Emerson resolved to set himself up as an independent writer and speaker, whose efforts would gain support and sustenance from the widening public interest in self-improvement and unconventional religious and spiritual explorations.

Having stepped away from the established guidelines of a conventional ecclesiastical career, however, Emerson lacked a readily available model for his own new endeavors, and lacked access to occasions and venues in which he could establish himself as a public intellectual force. In “Understanding Emerson,” Kenneth S. Sacks shows how Emerson solved these two problems, focusing on a single crucial event in Emerson’s life–his delivery in 1837 of the annual Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard, a challenging, occasionally taunting speech that would become known as “The American Scholar” and would launch him in his newly conceived role. A memorable plea for American cultural independence and originality, a blunt challenge to the sodden academicism of Harvard, and a life plan for passionately independent minds like his own, “The American Scholar” would in due course become the most celebrated academic lecture in American history.

Sacks takes us behind the scenes, so to speak, to show us how Emerson was selected to deliver the speech, and to give us a more vivid sense of the various intellectual currents and constituencies Emerson found himself navigating, even within his own Transcendentalist circles. Sacks’s Emerson is very much a man of his milieu, a stubborn and driven Yankee whose thoughts and deeds were inconceivable apart from his passive-aggressive ambivalence about the Unitarian elites staring back at him from the audience, including such dignitaries as Supreme Court justice Joseph Story and Massachusetts governor Edward Everett. The act of delivering such a speech before such an august group was a brave assertion of what Emerson would soon call “self-reliance,” a deed of self-definition that validated Emerson’s new role in the very act of presenting it to the world. Sifting through the record of Emerson’s inner life contained in his voluminous journals and correspondence, Sacks reveals Emerson as a struggling, uncertain figure, whose hunger to achieve self-reliance warred constantly against his need for approval from other quarters. His great effort of self-assertion seems more sympathetic, and less self-indulgent, when seen in this light.

But it is, of course, not enough merely to peg Emerson as a New Englander. He went on to enjoy a national and international career of unprecedented proportions, effectively using the lyceum movement and the lecture circuit as a means of polishing his ideas, spreading his Transcendentalist gospel, and paying his bills. Harold Bloom is on target in claiming that the influence of Emerson and his group of antebellum Concord writers has been enormous and remains undiminished. For many Americans, educated and uneducated alike, something like the Transcendentalist vision of reality forms the core of what America is all about as a nation.

THAT DOESN’T MEAN they’re right, however. And that is precisely the nub of the problem with Emerson. It is one thing to acknowledge his influence. It is quite another to propose that, in some sense, he is America, a proposition that is not only demonstrably false, but one that should arouse our suspicions, since it is an effort not only to define Emerson, but to define America. Anyone who proposes it needs to be reminded of the commanding presence in American life of a set of very different, and more sober, assumptions about liberty, moral authority, sin, human nature, and national identity–assumptions contained, among other places, in the theory and structure of the Constitution, and woven into the nation’s Christian, republican, and liberal traditions. Indeed, a fair understanding of Emerson ought to depict him as a man thoroughly shaped by such assumptions himself, whose rebellion takes on a different meaning in a world in which–unlike ours–there were still plenty of prescriptive elites left to push against.

The questions raised by all this are full of import for our national life. Is America best understood as a poetic land of possibility–a more wondrous affair than the mere “prose” of the Founders? Or is the American enterprise better understood as something far more sober and limited, grounded in a programmatic suspicion of human nature, and thereby in the very religious and moral traditions the Transcendentalists were challenging? Were the Transcendentalists the first to grasp the full dimensions of the American experiment, the first to embrace all the transformative possibilities inherent in what Emerson called the “unsearched might of man”? Or did they thereby seriously misconstrue the meaning of the American experiment? Did their work give rise to a fresh and expansive conception of human liberty, one that has underwritten much of what has been vibrant and distinctive about American life? Or did it underwrite the fatal hyperextension of our conceptions of liberty, undermining the solid social order that liberty must always presuppose?

IF EMERSON’S BICENTENNIAL is to be more than an occasion for visiting his gaudy tombstone, we need to face these questions and ask frankly what Emerson’s meaning is for us today. And at first glance, Lawrence Buell’s “Emerson,” a quasi-official effort timed to coincide with the bicentennial, would seem to do just that. Buell seems to take a larger and more open-ended view of his subject than Sacks, and wants to insist upon Emerson as a cosmopolitan thinker–which is just how Emerson would want to be seen. It is also encouraging to see Buell begin by telling us of his concern that “canonical figures like Emerson have been oversimplified in being thought of as icons of U.S. national culture”–though the use of the modifier “U.S.” in place of the more usual “American,” and in conjunction with the word “canonical,” alerts the reader to the possibility that a wave of academic babble is coming.

Sure enough, it soon emerges that the object of this exercise is something quite narrow and intramural, sadly reflecting the impoverished state of literary studies today. Buell wants to persuade his readers that Emerson is acceptable company for sophisticated literary scholars today, despite the unfortunate fact of his having been a straight white European male who said–or appeared to say–many laudatory things about “America.” With the right reading, careful pruning, and creative qualifications, a suitably transgressive Emerson can be salvaged from the wreckage and perhaps even transformed into a “representative man” of a new epoch in human history. Such an Emerson might even be invited to address the Modern Language Association.

Given such objectives, Buell’s “Emerson” could hardly help being a defensive, tedious book whose contents are twisted into a posture of near-constant genuflection before the idols of the present-day academy. Buell is less interested in our learning anything fresh from Emerson than he is in examining how well Emerson’s ideas line up with the proper political and social desiderata. The chief theme to which Buell returns with obsessive-compulsive regularity is his insistence that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Emerson was not parochial, not nationalistic, not chauvinistic. Instead, his Emerson “anticipated the globalizing world in which we increasingly live.” This Emerson advocated a “‘postnational’ form of consciousness.” He had “surprisingly little patience for nationalism as such.” He was “notable” for his “refusal to wave the flag.” He would have embraced current scholarship’s emphasis upon the perspectives of “marginalized” and “subaltern” groups. And so on.

ONE CAN ACTUALLY grant that some of this may be true, minus the jargon–but so what? Just who ever portrayed Emerson as the patron saint of the American Legion? Emerson may have been a provincial thinker in some respects, but he certainly never presented himself as one. He always spoke with the whole universe in mind as his audience. (The trees and plants, he averred, “nod to me, and I to them.”) Even Harold Bloom would not have spent so many years promoting Emerson had he not believed that Emerson’s work was deeply subversive of “official” American pieties. Since Buell does not bother to identify whom he is arguing against, one assumes that he is trying to assuage the concerns of his fellow “university researchers,” who are convinced that Emerson is a dangerously patriotic “Americanist,” and that that fact, along with his other manifest deficiencies of race, class, and gender, disqualifies him from being taken seriously.

THERE IS SOME VALUE in addressing such misconceptions–but not if it means merely substituting others for them. Buell’s busy effort to decontaminate Emerson is not only a distraction, but a distortion. It goes to the extreme of insisting that there is nothing particularly “American” about “The American Scholar,” that it is devoid of “cultural nationalism,” and that Emerson’s program is “nowhere” commended as an “American” program. This requires one to read the text with what can only be called willful selectivity. Buell quotes many lines from the address, but somehow neglects to cite these famous concluding words:

We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. . . . Not so, brothers and friends, please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. . . . A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

Buell’s commemoration of Emerson’s birthday gives us just what we didn’t need: yet another book that tells us more about the reigning anxieties of American academia than it does about the subject at hand. Buell praises Emerson as a source of inspiration to those who wish to improve themselves and feel a “need to question arbitrary authority, official wisdom, and their own internalized dutifulness.” But if this low-octane blend of uplift and antinomianism is the extent of the matter, one would be justified in wondering if Emerson is really worth the fuss. Can anyone seriously claim that American society at present has too few voices in it urging us to question authority and follow our bliss?

Fortunately, those are not the only claims to be made for Emerson. There are features of his thought that deserve to endure without requiring us to edit him for contemporary tastes, or contextualize him to death, or embrace his romantic individualism and New Age metaphysics.

To begin with, Emerson offers us a model of a fully engaged, whole-souled, and broadly democratic approach to intellectual life that has been largely lost in the context of the contemporary academy. It is often said–and the claim is supported persuasively in Peter Field’s fine study, “Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Making of a Democratic Intellectual”–that Emerson was America’s first “public intellectual.” But Field goes further than that, seeing in Emerson an especially prophetic exponent of the possibilities of democracy itself, a lone voice attributing American intellectuals’ famous “alienation from the crowd” not to the insufficiencies of the American people and the doleful effects of “democratic leveling” but to the failures of the thinking class itself. This is why “The American Scholar” so richly repays reading now. It reminds us that America’s intellectuals have never been quite equal to the promise of American life.

FIELD ALSO TOUCHES on a point rightly stressed two decades ago by the Emerson scholar David Robinson: Emerson is best understood not as a poet or a philosopher, but as a preacher. Indeed, one could claim that he was America’s first secular preacher and that his homiletic gift was his most fundamental one. The content of his beliefs may have shifted dramatically during the course of his life, but his methods and rhetorical style changed only incrementally from what they were during his days at Boston’s Second Church. It was always his aim to move his audiences and induce them to change their lives, rather than merely inform or persuade them. Whether speaking or writing, he was always performing, and his language was always charged with the force of exhortation.

This is more than just a question of Emerson’s style. Much has been made of his sensitivity to the riches and intricacies of language, in ways that seem to anticipate Wittgenstein and the “linguistic turn” of much fashionable twentieth-century thought. But such an effort to polish Emerson’s credentials surely misses something essential about him. His thinking about language is better understood in light of a saying formulated by the great anti-nominalist Richard Weaver: Language is sermonic. In this view, language always seeks to move us, in the same way a sermon does, and is most fully itself when permitted to realize that objective. Emerson wrote nothing that was not meant to be, in this sense, sermonic. He was a prophet of human possibility, who used his imaginative gifts to conjure new frontiers and flood the world with light.

So what are we, at last, to make of those grand sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson? It would be an error to imagine that Emerson ever divorced his understanding of himself from his understanding of America. The distinction Buell insists upon, between a bad “Americanist” Emerson and a good “cross-national” Emerson, would have meant almost nothing to Emerson himself. He saw no contradiction between the two, precisely because he understood the unfolding of the American experiment and the unfolding promise of humanity as two different expressions of the same historical phenomenon.

He saw the American Revolution as a beacon to all of humanity, and he believed that the embattled farmers of his beloved Concord had indeed fired a shot “heard round the world,” in the words of his own patriotic “Concord Hymn”–the best-known words Emerson ever wrote. Hence, when he called for Americans to cease taking their cues from “the courtly muses of Europe,” he was not advocating a withdrawal into insular provincialism. Instead, he thought that America was uniquely situated, by virtue of its history and current circumstances, to achieve something new under the sun–politically, socially, intellectually–and ought to do so for the sake not only of itself, but of all humanity.

PERHAPS he was mistaken in this bold, immodest belief. Yet in the end, it is hardly a belief unique to Emerson, or exclusively the property of Americans, and it is a belief that has proved much more resilient than all the scholarly monographs arrayed against it. President Bush echoed it earlier this year when he declared that “the advance of freedom” is “a calling we follow,” precisely because “the self-evident truths of our founding” are “true for all.” And British prime minister Tony Blair neatly reinforced it in his magnificent speech to the United States Congress this summer, reminding Americans that “destiny put you in this place in history, in this moment in time, and the task is yours to do.”

That was precisely Emerson’s message–for his own time, and for ours as well. There was much in Emerson we would do well to set aside. But in this important respect he is, indeed, closer to us than ever.

Wilfred M. McClay holds the SunTrust Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga.