Emerson, Thoreau, and the Role of the Cultural Critic

193 Pages·2001·0.548 MB·English

by  Sam McGuire Worley

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Sam McGuire Worley
State University of New York Press
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State University of New York Press, Albany
 2001 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Worley, Sam McGuire, 1959–
Emerson, Thoreau, and the role of the cultural critic / Sam McGuire Worley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–7914–4825–8 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0–7914–4826–6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803–1882—Political and social views.
2. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862—Political and social views. 3. Community.
4. Community in literature. I. Title.
HM756 .W67 2001
810.9′358—dc21 00-047010
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P / vii
A / xvii
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Politics without Transcendence / 1
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Eminent Men and the Immanent Critic / 25
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Slavery’s Slave / 50
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The Crank Within / 75
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The John Brown Problem / 99
C / 125
N / 131
W C / 163
I / 171
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Readers have, with considerable justification, long been comfortable with the
description of Emerson and Thoreau as transcendentalists. Their writings are
replete with appeals either to personal transcendence in the form of a mystical,
interior access to the first principles of the universe or to a sort of public transcen-
dence of contemporary law and morality in favor of higher laws. Even when
scholars have looked at them from the standpoint of politics and reform, the
tendency has generally been to see these activities as grounded in some variety of
philosophical idealism. Yet somewhat surprisingly both writers are obsessed with
history and culture. Clearly advocates of some variety of transcendence, Emerson
and Thoreau, nevertheless, represent the individual as both created by and creative
of an elaborate network of cultural forces and values. The type of transcendence
offered by these writers is, paradoxically, one immanent in their culture. Nowhere
is this more evident than when Emerson and Thoreau speak as critics of their own
society. They speak both as members of their culture and as its antagonists; they
attack their culture’s values and beliefs in the very name of their culture’s values
and beliefs. Consider, for example, a representative moment from Emerson’s 1851
“Address to the Citizens of Concord on the Fugitive Slave Law.” In the midst of a
furious attack on what he believes to be a corrupt and evil law he appeals to
transcendent principles as he laments the tardiness of his countrymen’s response:
I thought it a point on which all sane men were agreed, that the law must
respect the public morality. I thought that all men of all conditions had been
sharers of a certain experience, that in certain rare and retired moments they
had been made to see how man is man, or what makes the essence of
rational beings, namely, that, whilst animals have to do with eating the
fruits of the ground, men have to do with rectitude, with benefit, with truth,
with something which is independent of appearances: and that this tie
makes the substantiality of life, this, and not their ploughing or sailing, their
trade or the breeding of families. I thought every time a man goes back to
his own thoughts, these angels receive him, talk with him, and, that, in the
best hours, he is uplifted in virtue of this essence, into a peace and into a
power which the material world cannot give: that these moments counter-
balance the years of drudgery, and that this owning of a law, be it called
moral, religion, or godhead, or what you will, constituted the explanation of
vii
viii Preface
life, the excuse and indemnity for the errors and calamities which sadden it.
In long years consumed in trifles they remember these moments, and are
consoled. I thought it was this fair mystery, whose foundations are hidden in
eternity, which made the basis of human society, and of law; and that to
pretend anything else, as, that the acquisition of property was the end of
living, was to confound all distinctions, to make the world a greasy hotel,
and, instead of noble motives and inspirations, and a heaven of companions
and angels around and before us, to leave us in a grimacing menagerie of
monkeys and idiots. All arts, customs, societies, books, and laws, are good as
they foster and concur with this spiritual element; all men are beloved as
they raise us to it, all are hateful as they deny or resist it. The laws especially
draw their obligation only from their concurrence with it.1
There is no denying that this passage attests to a belief in transcendent moral
principles or higher laws. But what I find remarkable is the emphasis this passage
places on community and culture. A shared morality is the “tie” that forms society;
our“arts, customs, societies, books, and laws” each manifest these ties. Although
the“foundations” of these principles are “hidden in eternity,” we should note this
passage’s ambiguous representation of them as both private and interior manifesta-
tions as well as the substance of a shared public culture. This is hardly the picture
of a morally upright conscience at odds with a fallen culture that we usually
associate with transcendentalist dissent. Here, the grounds of dissent are repre-
sented as inherent in our culture. So when Emerson wants to argue that “immoral
laws are void,” his method is not to argue from abstract principles but to cite the
authority of “the great jurists, Cicero, Grotius, Coke, Blackstone, Burlamaqui,
Montesquieu, Vattel, Burke, Makintosh, [and] Jefferson.” But after calling on the
authority of culture, Emerson withdraws again, saying
I have no intention to recite these passages I had marked:—such citation
indeed seems to be something cowardly, for no reasonable person needs a
quotation from Blackstone to convince him that white cannot be legislated
to be black, and shall content myself with reading a single passage.2
Without the slightest hint of irony, Emerson then proceeds to furnish the relevant
quotation from Blackstone.
There is no particular logic or design underlying Emerson’s vacillations on
the priority of higher laws to culture. Setting aside for the moment any attempt to
interpret Emerson’s specific intentions in such a complex passage (the extent to
which his irony is conscious) we can safely say that whatever his philosophical
opinions, his actual practice as a critic of his culture suggests that while higher laws
may be morally authoritative for him, their social force is entirely dependent upon
Preface ix
the extent to which they are embedded in our practices, discourses, and institu-
tions. Higher laws, then, had best not be too awfully high if they are to have any
consequences for us.
The way one reads such contradictory moments in Emerson and Thoreau
ultimately depends upon whether or not you believe such moments to be mere
errors or to be somehow integral to their work. If you believe the former, and find
the errors so profound that they compromise the validity of Emerson and Thor-
eau’s arguments, then you will probably make some attempt to explain the nature
of these problems. One obvious contemporary way of doing this—my own ap-
proach when I first began to struggle with these texts—is to use the language of
ideological analysis to trace such contradictions back to larger contradictions in
the texts’ specific historical setting. But this can quickly degenerate, as it originally
did with me, into a game of spot-the-ideological-contradiction. Anachronism is
the least of the dangers one risks in such a game. More serious is the danger of
prematurely closing off one’s interaction with the text by dismissing certain types
of writing and thinking as merely demonstrating contradictions. It is not just left-
of-center readers of Emerson and Thoreau who make this error; more conven-
tionally, scholars of American philosophy have tended to undervalue these two
writers precisely because of their seeming indifference to contradicting them-
selves.3 They are deemed to lack seriousness, to be too literary. However, the latter
charge, I believe, relates to Emerson and Thoreau’s remarkable ability to exploit
the possibilities of language not simply to convey but to demonstrate their ideas
about self and society.
After trying to make sense of these writers and their works through the lens
of ideological criticism, I found myself, previously so scornful, increasingly per-
suaded that Emerson’s and Thoreau’s social writings involve a type of reflection
that cannot be understood adequately with the language of ideological contradic-
tion. For example, after struggling with Emerson’s use of the word “necessity” in
one of his essays, I slowly began to realize that his use of the word was fully ironic,
that what he meant by necessity was almost the exact opposite of what is usually
meant by that word. Similarly, after critically examining the instances in which
Thoreau’s reflections in Walden on the autonomous individual are saturated with
cultural references, it gradually occurred to me that these allusions resulted pre-
cisely because Thoreau’s rhetoric was working indirectly to suggest something
other than autonomy. In short, I came to believe that Emerson and Thoreau were
both involved in a line of thinking that took them beyond the pale of not only
transcendentalism, but, perhaps more surprisingly, some of the most basic aspects
of American liberalism. At the heart of their enterprise was a new conception of
how they, as both its critics and its members, were to relate to their own culture.
Political evaluations of Emerson and Thoreau have generally either cele-
brated them as exponents of an extreme form of individualism or chastised them