Here is a draft of a talk I am to give soon. I was asked to present something that might inspire majors and non-majors, and to do something more like what I would do in a class than what I would do giving a conference paper. This is the result so far. It is a formalization of the sort of thing I might do in an upper-level class. Since I think of it as a talk and not a paper, it is not bedecked with all the scholarly niceties–footnotes or full footnotes, etc. Most of the footnotes are really just drawers in which I have stashed useful quotations or (I hope) brief, helpful clarifications. Comments welcome.
Category Archives: Emerson
Hats Off
Commenting on Emerson’s late-life aphasia, West writes:
…In his aphasia he often turned to action to supplement failing speech. Some of his gestures attained an uncanny purity of expression beyond anything in the language of nature dreamed of by Condillac. One morning Mrs. Emerson and his doctor led him into the garden to see the roses. Struck by one unusually fine specimen, the doctor repeated a line from George Herbert’s “Vertue,” which Emerson had recited to him at length many years before. Emerson gazed at the rose in admiration, then as if on impulse gently lifted his hat and said with a low bow, “I take my hat off to it”. That was the heroic act of a very great orator, who, as words failed him, still contrived with diminished vocabulary to match the eloquence of his prose.
Michael West, Transcendental Wordplay
Emerson Comment on Philosophy
Philosophy is called the homesickness of the soul.
Some Hesitant Thoughts after Mooney
I find what Ed has written very helpful, as I said. One reason for that is because he clearly recognizes the difficulty of self-knowledge—that is, the conceptual difficulty about it (not the difficulty of acquiring it, although it is difficult to acquire). Self-knowledge is not simply a species of information, information about myself. Sure, there is lots of information about me, and lots of it I know (and some of it is hard to know, I need, e.g., doctors or x-rays to tell me about it), but none of that is what Socrates or Kierkegaard or Emerson calls on me to care about. –In fact, Kierkegaard and Emerson signal this by ringing changes on the Delphic Commandment—“Choose yourself!” (Kierkegaard) and “Obey yourself!” (Emerson), distancing themselves deliberately from ‘know’ (without disavowing it).
As I see it, the difficulty (the conceptual difficulty) of self-knowledge reveals itself best when it is seen in the context of Perfectionism. Now, although I am not quite a Moral Perfectionist of the Cavellian (Emersonian) sort, I am a Perfectionist. (I suppose I could be called a Christian Perfectionist—of a Gregory-of-Nyssa sort. Explaining that is a task for another day.) And my Perfectionism can help itself to the “unattained but attainable self” structure that Cavell’s has. Crucial to that structure is a form of self-involvement (in a non-pejorative sense) that can be described as knowing, as choosing and as obeying. It can be described as discovery and as creativity.
Consider Kierkegaard’s “One must become a Christian.” I take this as a grammatical remark. But this means that no particular place a person finds himself on his Pilgrim’s Progress is going to be the final stop. Even if the Pilgrim is, in one sense, a Christian, it will also be true that there is another sense in which he is not a Christian. That is, for anyone who recognizes the grammatical remark, and lives in the light of that recognition, the term ‘Christian’ subdivides into two senses, one that applies to him now, and which seems to him now at best unsatisfying (conventional, rote, sclerotized, immanent), and another that does not (yet) apply to him now, but which seems to him to call him forward (and is unconventional, spontaneous, supple, transcendent).[1] That person reaches out, as it were, toward the second sense by standing on the very edge of the first. The transcendent Christian self that the person is reaching out to is his own, himself, but is that transcendent self as yet is not fully determinate. Who he will be when he becomes his transcendent Christian self is not (yet) fixed, not fully fixed. And yet he will be himself. He will be transmuted … into himself. When he becomes his transcendent Christian self, he will come to know himself, but he will also choose himself, and he will obey himself. He will discover himself and create himself. Which of these descriptions we use will be a matter of how we center ourselves on the structure of his immanent Christian self and his transcendent Christian self. If we center ourselves on the entire structure, then knowing is a natural enough description, since he comes to know a self he has not previously known, or to know about himself something he had not previously known. If we center ourselves on his immanent self, then choosing is a natural enough description, since he determines or fixes, at least partially, that transcendent self. Or, if we center ourselves on his transcendent self, then obeying is a natural enough description, since he has called himself (immanent) to himself (transcendent). So far as I can tell, none of these centerings is compulsory, all are available, and so each of the descriptions they generate is available—and natural enough. But even so, each of the descriptions is still in need delicate handling, since each is liable to be misunderstood.
Ed’s fascinating talk of ‘knowing-how’ relates to what I have in mind. Ed understandably wants to retain the word knowledge (as I do too). But since the knowledge we are after is not simply a species of information, a good thought is to treat the knowledge as know-how (where what is known is clearly enough not information). Then we can think of our Christian as knowing how to become a Christian, and as utilizing his know-how by so doing.
Ed complicates his know-how story by bringing in ideas of loyalty, pledging and promising. And here what he says sounds particularly Perfectionist. When he mentions that the pledging he has in mind is “pledging-in-the-relative-dark”, I understand that as quite close to my idea that the transcendent self is not understood, not fully understood.
(I should add that although most of what I said on this topic in the previous post (and comments) painted self-knowledge as “confessional” or “reflective” (to use Ed’s terms) I too believe there is a commissive side to all of this, and that is part of the reason I have chosen to foreground my Perfectionist framework as I have. Ed’s post helped me to see how better to balance what I wanted to say.)
Knowing, choosing and obeying are each natural enough descriptions, but each is liable to misunderstanding. That all of the descriptions are natural enough reveals that each has its liability, since each normally ‘negates’ the other. To seize one and to reject the others is not a good idea; the phenomenon to be saved is responsive to each, and not just serially but somehow all at once. Socrates calls us to examine ourselves, so as to live worthily. Kierkegaard calls us to choose ourselves, so that we are responsible for ourselves. Emerson calls us out in front of ourselves, so that we can become our best.
[1] Each transcendent self condemns the immanent self and inspires its own eventual condemnation, since as it becomes immanent a new transcendent self becomes visible.
Daily Bread, The Sky
I was talking a few days ago with my good friend, Loxley, about the mysteries of ‘ἐπιούσιον‘, daily bread, supersubstantial bread (Matt 6:11). Today I found this line of Emerson’s:
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
That’s quite a line, isn’t it?
Emerson on Montaigne 2: The Considerer
Emerson calls the skeptic, calls Montaigne, the Considerer. (See the quotation in EoM1.) What does this mean? It is tempting, I believe, to take it to mean something like judge. But I do not think that is the meaning, or at least it is not the primary meaning of the term. It is better to situate the term in contexts like this: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow…” Kierkegaard, commenting on this scriptural passage, writes: …[C]onsider them, that is, pay close attention to them: make them the object, not of a hasty glance in passing, but of your consideration…Alas, how many are there who truly consider them in accordance with the Gospel’s instructions.” I am not claiming that Emerson has Matthew 6 in mind when he chose the word ‘Considerer’, but I do think that he is using the word in that way, Kierkegaard’s way. My point is that the Considerer does not understand himself as standing over and above what he considers. No, he is enmeshed in what he considers, and his considering it is his way of learning how to cope in and with it all. To consider them to to attentively submit to them, to let them impress themselves upon you. But that only works to the extent that you are in sympathy and likeness to what you consider. –And this is another useful point of comparison with Kierkegaard, since one upshot of his edifying discourse on “What We Learn from the Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air” is that the lilies and the birds can teach us nothing if we take ourselves to be nothing like them.
Of course, the drift of Emerson and Kierkegaard seems very different. Emerson is describing something linked with prudence; Kierkegaard is describing something contrasted with prudence. For Kierkegaard, the lesson of the lilies of the field and the birds of the air is that we are only independent in complete dependence on God. To learn the lesson of that complete dependence is not merely to believe that it is so but to live out that complete dependence. So do the lilies and the birds. What we learn from them must be reduplicated in our lives, or we have not really learned it. –But understood this way, the drift of Kierkegaard and of Emerson is not so very different, though sketching out the similarities would take more time than I have. For now, let me just note this: Each passage targets our vanity. Kierkegaard, following scripture, tells us to learn from, submit to, the birds of the air. Emerson, following his genius, tells us we are but poppinjays, little vulnerable conceited poppinjays. Let us be Considerers–but not in vain.
More On Emerson’s Incarnational Method
I intend to get to Emerson on Montaigne, really to get to it, soon. But I find myself wanting, needing I guess, to say more about what I turbidly called “Emerson’s Incarnational Method“. I was drawn to that phrase because it seemed, and still seems to me to educe something deeply important in Emerson, something both inspiring and difficult. I addressed the inspiring last time. I want now to address the difficult. I do so with hesitancy, for reasons that should be apparent momentarily.
A common complaint about Emerson is that he lacks a sense of tragedy. There is something to that. Recall the awful scene of Emerson having Waldo exhumed, so that he can see that Waldo is dead, that Waldo’s dust is returning to dust. Emerson wants to think and write Incarnationally; he wants to live that way. But he cannot manage it resolutely. (Can anyone?) When writing to read in public, he tends always to see the relationship of fact to morals, to see the heavens in the earthly world. And this makes him, and his urging his readers toward self-reliance and self-obedience, too Docetist. He has a hard time with the hard facts, with the facts in relation to sensation. He writes from a luminous sense of omniscence, of omnipotence: everything is transfigured, aglow with uncreated light. But in his writing for himself, in his living, he finds that he is a dwarf, omni-nescient, powerless. He is too Ebionite. His son is taken from him in the sixth year of his joy, but Emerson cannot accept that. Death, in particular the death of Waldo, seems like the triumph of sensation over morals, a putting-out of the uncreated light, darkness. As he puts it in a journal entry (the one I am weaving into this post), he knows himself defeated constantly, but believes he is “born to victory”.
It strikes me that Emerson lacks a true sense of the sacramental. (I believe this shows itself in Emerson’s (mis)understanding of religious ritual.) For Emerson, creation itself is and should be sacramental, and the Incarnation he is and strives better to be is itself an instance of the sacramental, and is oriented toward the fullness of the sacramental. The Incarnation finishes the sacramental activity of creation. Emerson needs to see the material as itself what realizes the spiritual, the tangible as what itself what realizes the moral. But he all-too-often sees the material as opposed to the spiritual, the tangible as opposed to the moral. So seeing, he all-too-often confronts facts divided, divided into the side that is related to sensation and the side that is related to morals. So seeing, he becomes overwhelmed with the material, with sensation, and cannot find his way out of the darkness. He would have Waldo immortal; he cannot imagine Waldo resurrected: he is left with Waldo dead. –How can someone born to victory be so defeated?
Emerson’s Incarnational Method
Right at the beginning of his essay on Montaigne, Emerson writes:
Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and on the other to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these sides, to find the other.
I take this to be a method–Emerson’s method. For us, raised as we have been to believe that there is a gulf fixed between sensation and morals, the method is hard to imagine. To play the game one way, finding the morals in sensation, seems romantic. To play the other way, finding the sensation in morals, seems crass. And anyway, what exactly is Emerson saying? Facts have sides? They can be rotated, reoriented, so that the apparent side changes?
I am not really going to answer these questions. Instead, I want the asking of them to provide the occasion for saying this: Emerson writes scripture. As he says in his essay on Goethe, “we too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world.” This is a close to a skeleton key to Emerson as I know. The broad outlines of Emerson’s work become clear when we reflect on it. Christian dogma treats Jesus, the God-Man, as the one who unites the heavens and the earthly world. Emerson will dispense with the dogma but without dispensing with its structure: the heavens do need to be united to the earthly world. Jesus was taken to have done that in fact, ontologically, we might say. But for Emerson Jesus is a man, merely a man. Jesus, like Montaigne and Goethe, is a representative man, the greatest of representative men. Still, a mere man. For Emerson the Incarnation–the uniting of the heavens to the earthly world–is not something that has been done. It is something that must needs be done. Incarnation, for Emerson, is not so much a fact or a point of departure; it is more a conquest and a goal. He writes toward it. He writes his Bible.
Emerson urges his readers to unite the heavens and the earthly world in themselves; he asks his readers to become Incarnations. Well, that is not quite right: he reminds his readers that they are always already Incarnating, becoming more fully Incarnations than they are; his readers are to strive toward an ever more perfect unity of the heavens and the earthly world in themselves. The heavens and the earthly world need to more fully interpenetrate one another. The centerpiece of Emerson’s understanding of human greatness–this is it. Over and over Emerson reminds and urges his readers: Incarnate yourselves!
For Emerson, each human being is and is called to Incarnation. Emerson begs us to hear and heed that call. Because we are Incarnations we can hear it. Because we can become more fully Incarnations we must heed it.
Emerson’s line about facts is an Incarnational method, a reminder that the good gamester of thought always understands each fact in relation to the heavens and the earthly world, and always works to reveal one when the other threatens to eclipse it. To fail in the method is either to become a Docetist or an Ebionite about yourself, about everything, it is to leave your task of uniting the heavens and the earthly world undone.
Emerson Finds Montaigne
…[S]ince the personal regard which I entertain for Montaigne my be unduly great, I will, under the shield of the prince of egotists, offer, as an apology for electing him as the representative of skepticism, a world or two to explain how my love began and grew for this admirable gossip.
A single odd volume of Cotton’s translation of the essays remained to me from my father’ library, when a boy. It lay long neglected, until, after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read the book, and procured the remaining volumes. I remember the delight and wonder in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I myself had written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience. It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in the cemetery of Pere la Chaise, I came to a tomb of Auguste Collignon, who died in 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the monument, “lived to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on the Essays of Montaigne.” Some years later, I became acquainted with an accomplished English poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my correspondence, I found that, from a love of Montaigne, he had made a pilgrimage to his château, still standing…and, had copied from the walls of his library the inscriptions which Montaigne had written there.
“I remember the delight and wonder in which I lived with it.” My life has been punctuated by books: Plato, in high school; Plotinus and Schopenhauer and Santayana, in college; Kant and Austin, in graduate school; Wittgenstein and Frege, in my first years at Auburn; Marcel and Montaigne, in recent days. Who knows what book will speak to him? Or when? But some books do speak so sincerely to our thought and experience that we cannot help but believe those books written by us–for how else could they have so undeniably been written for us?
Often when we read, the book says to us, “Your concern is not mine. My hour has not yet come.” But then, later, the book’s hour does come, and it reveals itself on time: emerging from a pile of books knocked over in the corner of the study; called forth by some phrase in another book; mentioned repeatedly in conversation: and then we read, we drink deep; the good wine was kept until now. I simply cannot say with what delight and wonder I read Philosophical Investigations when I found I could read it, when its hour had come. The thrill of the Preface to Foundations of Arithmetic had me running, more or less, up and down the department hallway, trying to get anyone whose office door was open to listen to me as I read passages from it aloud. When I read Frege’s Three Principles, I had the feeling of great doors flung open suddenly–something I desperately wanted to understand was opened to me, even if it was not yet mine. I think too of littler things: the comic marvel of Austin’s footnotes; the incisive charm of Sellars’ occasional metaphilosophical pronouncements (“The landscape of philosophy is not only not a desert, it is not even a flatland”); and so on. The many and varied pleasures of philosophical reading.
Emerson lived with Montaigne’s essays. He did not just read them. Our lives are read within our favorite books; the books are not read within our lives. The covers of our favorite books enclose us. Our lives are bound by our reading.
Orienting on Emerson on Montaigne
I am interested in Emerson’s essay on Montaigne in two primary ways: (1) I am interested in how Emerson understands Montaigne’s skepticism and (2) I am interested in what Emerson learns from Montaigne about how to write, in particular how to write essays. Emerson says quite a lot, unsurprisingly, about the first; but he says only a little about the second, and that indirectly, by commenting on Montaigne’s style. But I am convinced that there is quite a bit more to be said about the second question than Emerson himself says, perhaps more than Emerson himself could have said. I also suspect that the answer to the first question itself sheds light on the answer to the second, since I suspect that the style Emerson learns from Montaigne can itself be described as a skeptical style.
I find Emerson’s style to be itself a puzzle. That is one reason I hope for help from the Montaigne essay. What is Emerson doing with words? Cavell, of course, has quite a bit to say about that, and I may bring him into the discussion at needful moments. Ultimately I hope to be able to say something about Emerson distinctive use of words, and about Montaigne’s too.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 