Emerson and Us

...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...

...It was always his aim to move his audiences and induce them to change their lives, rather than merely inform or persuade them...

...Such an Emerson might even be invited to address the Modern Language Association...

...The problem was worked out...

...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...

...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...

...This is more than just a question of Emerson's style...

...This is why "The American Scholar" so richly repays reading now...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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 celiba-cy—a moment that has given us such disparate legacies as the revivalistic camp meeting, Seventh-Day Adven-tism, Mormonism, Shaker furniture, and Graham crackers...

...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...

...One could hardly think of a more illustrious circle of American writers than Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller...

...I must be myself...

...This Emerson advocated a "'postnational' form of consciousness...

...Buell's busy effort to decontaminate Emerson is not only a distraction, but a distortion...

...national culture"—though the use of the modifier "U.S...

...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...

...Indeed, all of them (with the exception of Fuller, who died in a shipwreck) are also buried there today...

...He had "surprisingly little patience for nationalism as such...

...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 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...

...It would be an error to imagine that Emerson ever divorced his understanding of himself from his understanding of America...

...we will work with our own hands...

...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...

...His thinking about language is better understood in light of a saying formulated by the great anti-nominalist Richard Weaver: Language is sermonic...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...There was much in Emerson we would do well to set aside...

...Emerson wrote nothing that was not meant to be, in this sense, sermonic...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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 contex-tualize him to death, or embrace his romantic individualism and New Age metaphysics...

...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...

...The questions raised by all this are full of import for our national life...

...He did his bit for the bicentennial by proclaiming Emerson to be "the dominant sage of the American imagination," "the central figure in American culWilfred M. McClay holds the SunTrust Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga...

...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...

...One can actually grant that some of this may be true, minus the jargon—but so what...

...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...

...But a substantial legacy left him by his recently deceased wife Ellen gave him breathing room and a chance to reorder his life...

...It placed the ideal of the majestic, isolated, and inviolable Self at the center of its thought and the center of Nature itself...

...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...

...But it is, of course, not enough merely to peg Emerson as a New Englander...

...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...

...Instead, his Emerson "anticipated the globalizing world in which we increasingly live...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...For many Americans, educated and uneducated alike, something like the Tran-scendentalist vision of reality forms the core of what America is all about as a nation...

...It would quickly be devoured by the revolution it had engendered...

...The distinction Buell insists upon, between a bad "Americanist" Emerson and a good "cross-national" Emerson, would have meant almost nothing to Emerson himself...

...Indeed, one could claim that he was America's first secular preacher and that his homiletic gift was his most fundamental one...

...He would have embraced current scholarship's emphasis upon the perspectives of "marginalized" and "subaltern" groups...

...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men...

...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...

...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...

...Were the Tran-scendentalists 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...

...Transcendentalism promoted a social and ethical theory that amounted to little more than the principle of self-trust...

...Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind...

...The occasion was duly noted...

...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...

...Perhaps he was mistaken in this bold, immodest belief...

...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...

...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...

...Where isn't Emerson...

...They] had solved the universe, or had offered and realized the best solution yet tried...

...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...

...It reminds us that America's intellectuals have never been quite equal to the promise of American life...

...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...

...It also was rather sketchy on details of political and social thought...

...Is America best understood as a poetic land of possibility—a more wondrous affair than the mere "prose" of the Founders...

...It is one thing to acknowledge his influence...

...Instead, he held, the Transcendental Self enjoyed an absolute liberty, free of any external restraint or law other than that of its own nature...

...One is seal, and one is print...

...But the observances had a quiet, perfunctory air about them...

...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...

...In the Transcendental utopia, individuals perfected themselves in unfettered liberty, in order that they might form a community that thrives without authority or traditions...

...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...

...Americans know they're expected to revere Emerson...

...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...

...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...

...The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame...

...So what are we, at last, to make of those grand sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson...

...Bloom has been promoting Emerson for years now, and such statements, though predictably overblown, have a certain plausibility to them...

...At the elegant Emerson Inn in Rockport, where the master is thought to have vacationed, one could even acquire a bronze bust for $350...

...The specific hierarchical establishment against which Transcendentalism was rebelling, though, was Uni-tarianism, 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...

...from the famous 1841 essay on "Self-Reliance...

...Yet one sympathizes with Bloom...

...Both were part and parcel of the Universal Soul that superintended all things...

...There is some value in addressing such misconceptions—but not if it means merely substituting others for them...

...His great effort of self-assertion seems more sympathetic, and less self-indulgent, when seen in this light...

...Nothing," remarked Henry Adams, who knew that old Bostonian world well, "quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the Unitarian clergy...

...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...

...He was a prophet of human possibility, who used his imaginative gifts to conjure new frontiers and flood the world with light...

...In Transcendentalism, the anagogical mysticism of Jonathan Edwards was turned loose in an unEdwardsian universe, one in which Nature had lost its fallen fearsomeness and the sense of sin itself had begun to evaporate...

...This requires one to read the text with what can only be called willful selectivity...

...Emerson's own family had faithfully traced the path of this portion of religious history...

...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...

...Just who ever portrayed Emerson as the patron saint of the American Legion...

...Unitari-anism, which itself started out as an insurgency, had with amazing speed become a byword for smug complacency...

...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...

...But such an effort to polish Emerson's credentials surely misses something essential about him...

...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...

...Still, it's hard to locate the particular points where Emerson's influence has been most strongly felt...

...we will speak our own minds...

...Or did they thereby seriously misconstrue the meaning of the American experiment...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Emerson and Us The American scholar as American preacher BY WILFRED M. MCCLAY The bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson's birth on May 25, 1803, has come and gone, leaving surprisingly little in its wake...

...And so on...

...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 Transcenden-talists were challenging...

...Can anyone seriously claim that American society at present has too few voices in it urging us to question authority and follow our bliss...

...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 überProtestant who greased the skids from "Here I Stand" (Martin Luther, 1521) to "I've Gotta Be Me" (Sammy Davis Jr., 1969...

...But they are not sure quite why...

...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...

...But in this important respect he is, indeed, closer to us than ever...

...Emerson may have been a provincial thinker in some respects, but he certainly never presented himself as one...

...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...

...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...

...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 was too free-floating, skeptical, and self-satisfied for any of that...

...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...

...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...

...With the right reading, careful pruning, and creative qualifications, a suitably trans-gressive Emerson can be salvaged from the wreckage and perhaps even transformed into a "representative man" of a new epoch in human history...

...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...

...And that is precisely the nub of the problem with Emerson...

...ture," 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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...We will walk on our own feet...

...Not so, brothers and friends, please God, ours shall not be so...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...That was precisely Emerson's message—for his own time, and for ours as well...

...The eminent literary scholar Harold Bloom has few doubts on that score...

...Some are not even sure they should...

...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...

...He always spoke with the whole universe in mind as his audience...

...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...

...Its laws are the laws of his own mind...

...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...

...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...

...Transcendentalism became the evangelicalism of the New England intelligentsia...

...That doesn't mean they're right, however...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Or did it underwrite the fatal hyperextension of our conceptions of liberty, undermining the solid social order that liberty must always presuppose...

...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...

...One can hardly blame him...

...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...

...He was "notable" for his "refusal to wave the flag...

...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...

...The trees and plants, he averred, "nod to me, and I to them...

...The vastness of Nature's external panorama was exactly matched by the vastness of the soul's interior estate...

...Whether speaking or writing, he was always performing, and his language was always charged with the force of exhortation...

...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...

...And at first glance, Lawrence Buell's Emerson, a quasi-official effort timed to coincide with the bicentennial, would seem to do just that...