Emerson, Thoreau, and the Role of the Cultural Critic

Sam Mcguire Worley

Description

Emerson, Thoreau, and the Role of the Cultural Critic offers an important reinterpretation of the central works of two key figures in American letters. Drawing upon the work of several important contemporary thinkers—including Michael Walzer, Alisdair MacIntrye, Charles Taylor, and Stanley Cavell—Sam McGuire Worley argues that the mature thought of Emerson and Thoreau is deeply imbedded in community, and that their best social criticism is immanent rather than transcendent in character. Their encounters with specific historical figures such as Daniel Webster, Theodore Parker, and John Brown reveal a political philosophy that cannot easily be labeled liberal or conservative, and a meticulous reconsideration of their political writings and their encounter with abolitionism show both to be working with as complex and ironic a vision of self and community as can be found in antebellum American letters.

Preface

Acknowledgments

One. Politics without Transcendence

Two. Eminent Men and the Innocent Critic

Three. Slavery's Slave

Four. The Crank Within

Five. The John Brown Problem

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Sujets

• USA
• United States of America
• Literary theory
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 14 décembre 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780791491362
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

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E,T,   R  CC

Sam McGuire Worley

State University of New York Press

Published by 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

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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A/ xvii

O Politics without Transcendence / 1

T Eminent Men and the Immanent Critic / 25

T Slavery’s Slave / 50

F The Crank Within / 75

F The John Brown Problem / 99

C/ 125

N/ 131

WC/ 163

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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

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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 1 draw their obligation only from their concurrence with it.

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 2 to be black, and shall content myself with reading a single passage.

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

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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- 3 selves. 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 inWaldenon 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