Emerson as Philosopher: Postmodernism and Beyond 3031325451, 9783031325458

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Philosophy as Thinking
Emerson’s Method
My Method
Part I: Emerson as Philosopher
Chapter 2: Emerson as Philosopher
Chapter 3: Emerson on Thinking via Peirce and Beauvoir
Emerson and the Comic
Emerson and Beauvoir’s Serious Man
Why Anyone’s Oppression Oppresses Me
Ambiguities of ‘Seriousness’
Emerson and Frost: Seriousness and Humor; Grievances and Griefs
Chapter 4: Philosophy of the People
Part II: Postmodern Emerson
Chapter 5: Postmodern Emerson
Emerson and Rorty: A Reading of Postmodern Philosophy
Emersonian Hermeneutics
Emerson and Deleuze and Guattari: BwO’s
Žižek and the OwB
Part III: Emerson and…
Chapter 6: Emerson and Žižek: On the Crack in Everything, or, the Dialectical Nature of Philosophy and the World
The Handsome Absolute
Response to a Possible Objection
Real Ideas, the Kafkaesque, and Resistentialism
Chapter 7: Emerson and Paz: Evolutionary Existentialism
Dialectics of Waking and Sleeping: Labyrinths and Fiestas; Silence and Language
Inspiration as Collaboration as Thinking
Chapter 8: Emerson and Irigaray: The Sorites of Ethical Difference
Ironic Sex, Active Sex
The Labyrinth of Solitude of Sexual Difference: Irigaray on Nietzsche and Ariadne
Chapter 9: Emerson and Derrida: On the Track of the Circle Trace
Derrida on Exergue and Parergon
Chapter 10: Emerson and Heidegger: Thinking as Thanking
Chapter 11: Conclusion: A Brief Reading of “Fate”: Thinking about “Fate” after Cavell, Bloom, and Rorty
From tertium non datur to tertium datur
Index

Citation preview

Emerson as Philosopher Postmodernism and Beyond

Richard Gilmore

Emerson as Philosopher

Richard Gilmore

Emerson as Philosopher Postmodernism and Beyond

Richard Gilmore Philosophy Concordia College Morehead, MN, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-32545-8    ISBN 978-3-031-32546-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32546-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Ellen

Preface

Whenever I am feeling intellectually insipid, no savor to my thoughts, lost in the dullness of an intellectual funk, I reach for my Emerson. I think most people think that Emerson is a relic of the past, a curio of the American literary tradition, worth, perhaps, a glance, but not someone who it is important to read. And, indeed, to participate in most of the intellectual conversations of the day, he is not. On the other hand, if you want to be provoked into thought. If you want to think I can think of no better place to go, along with the dialogues of Plato, than an essay of Emerson’s. The thing about Emerson’s essays is that they are endlessly fruitful. There is the joy of having to look up words that are both unfamiliar and strange like “menstruum” or “quadrumanous.” There is the growing suspicion that there is more going on in the essays than it first appears. There is, finally, the realization that you are in the presence of a real genius, and one who is willing to share with you everything he knows. In his book Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences Slavoj Žižek says, “The measure of the true love for a philosopher is that one recognizes traces of his concepts all around in one’s daily experience.”1 Since a significant part of my daily experience is reading philosophy, I am always finding traces of Emerson in everything I read. Basically, what I like in any philosopher I read, I think, is Emersonian, and what I do not like, 1  Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004), 3.

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I think, is some version of Beauvoirian ‘seriousness,’ so I guess that means that I love Emerson. To try to convey why I love Emerson, I have tried to show the way I see Emerson popping up in the work of all sorts of other philosophers. It especially pleases me to find traces of Emerson in the most unlikely of places, in the philosophies that, at first glance, seem least Emersonian. I am not finding in these works anything that Emerson actually said in his own essays, exactly, and I am certainly not talking about direct influences, as if Deleuze or Derrida or Irigaray ever read any Emerson, but it is the ideas that keep emerging, Emerson’s ideas. And to that extent, and I provide a schematic genealogy for this, I do think there are lines of influences from Emerson to Deleuze and Derrida and Irigaray because his ideas are carried through the thinking of Nietzsche and from Nietzsche into Heidegger, and from Heidegger into Sartre and Beauvoir. My audience for this book is really my own undergraduate philosophy major and graduate student in philosophy self, and for those people who are in similar situations today who might appreciate, first, that a person can love a philosopher and her or his ideas; and second, to see how different philosophers and different philosophies can be brought together into more or less one conversation, via an extraordinarily powerful thinker like Emerson. There is a kind of oppressiveness to studying philosophy. It is hard and there is so much to know, and so much of philosophy does not seem particularly interesting or relevant. It is necessary to do that work if you take philosophy seriously, the work of the “bookworm,” as Emerson says, but that is not all that philosophy is. I am not claiming to be an authority on any of the thinkers, philosophers, that I discuss in this work, not even on Emerson. I am just sharing the thoughts that have been provoked in me by their thinking, and especially, by Emerson’s. What I love are the ideas, which are what I try to convey in this work.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Philosophy as Thinking  1 Emerson’s Method   8 My Method  11 Part I Emerson as Philosopher  15 2 Emerson as Philosopher 17 3 Emerson  on Thinking via Peirce and Beauvoir 33 Emerson and the Comic  38 Emerson and Beauvoir’s Serious Man  42 Why Anyone’s Oppression Oppresses Me  48 Ambiguities of ‘Seriousness’  50 Emerson and Frost: Seriousness and Humor; Grievances and Griefs  52 4 Philosophy of the People 57 Part II Postmodern Emerson  63 5 Postmodern Emerson 65 Emerson and Rorty: A Reading of Postmodern Philosophy  73 Emersonian Hermeneutics  85 ix

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Contents

Emerson and Deleuze and Guattari: BwO’s  86 Žižek and the OwB  90 Part III Emerson and…  93 6 E  merson and Žižek: On the Crack in Everything, or, the Dialectical Nature of Philosophy and the World 95 The Handsome Absolute 103 Response to a Possible Objection 113 Real Ideas, the Kafkaesque, and Resistentialism 114 7 Emerson  and Paz: Evolutionary Existentialism121 Dialectics of Waking and Sleeping: Labyrinths and Fiestas; Silence and Language 128 Inspiration as Collaboration as Thinking 135 8 Emerson  and Irigaray: The Sorites of Ethical Difference145 Ironic Sex, Active Sex 153 The Labyrinth of Solitude of Sexual Difference: Irigaray on Nietzsche and Ariadne 161 9 Emerson  and Derrida: On the Track of the Circle Trace165 Derrida on Exergue and Parergon 173 10 Emerson and Heidegger: Thinking as Thanking183 11 Conclusion:  A Brief Reading of “Fate”: Thinking about “Fate” after Cavell, Bloom, and Rorty197 From tertium non datur to tertium datur  204 Index207

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Philosophy as Thinking

…instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. —Emerson, “The American Scholar”1

In the work that follows I aspire to Thinking. I make no promises. What has felt like Thinking to me may appear as the banal plodding of the worst bookworm to others. My point, however, is that I do not propose to get Emerson ‘right.’ I do not present what follows as Emerson ‘scholarship,’ although I have done a lot of scholarship on Emerson over the course of the last thirty years. I was surprised, and in a way, delighted, to read Joseph Urbas’ very strong critique of Stanley Cavell’s readings of Emerson. In an article entitled “How Close a Reader of Emerson Is Stanley Cavell?” Urbas answers his eponymous question with a succinct, italicized, “not very.”2 Urbas says that Cavell’s reading of Emerson “is based on a misunderstanding;” that the “textual grounds” of Cavell’s readings “are comparatively small…and those not always accurately quoted

1  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson: Essays and Lectures: Nature; Addresses, and Lectures; Essays: First and Second Series; Representative Men; English Traits; The Conduct of Life (New York: The Library of American, Penguin Books, 1983), 57. 2  Joseph Urbas, “How Close a Reader of Emerson is Stanley Cavell?” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 31, No. 4 (2017), 558.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Gilmore, Emerson as Philosopher, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32546-5_1

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or construed.” In sum, and Urbas almost seems not to have enough bad names to call Cavell, Urbas says of Cavell’s reading of Emerson: The result is an unquestionably bold and original yet in many ways unsubstantiated reading of Emerson—a reading that appeals to postmodern sensibilities of a darker, skeptical, postreligious, antimetaphysical variety. Cavell is perhaps the best example of ‘present-minded’ approaches to Emerson.3

As a kind of knock-down proof of Cavell’s slipshod, irresponsible reading of Emerson, Urbas cites Joel Porte calling Cavell “a careless literary scholar” who misquotes Emerson into a “mangled sentence” that “makes no sense.” Urbas’ own gloss on Porte’s criticism of Cavell is “Cavell’s misquotation weakens Emerson’s ‘crucial claim’ by omitting the very word that gives it philosophical content—the word right.”4 That is a strong claim, and an apparently damning one, that Cavell misquotes Emerson, that Cavell cannot get Emerson right even so far as a straight quotation goes. What can we expect when Cavell starts interpreting his own misquotations? It will be something dark, skeptical, irreligious, antimetaphysical, and, worst of all, postmodern. I wonder how Urbas would take Cavell’s claim, he calls it a “confession,” in The World Viewed that, even if he gets some details about the movies he is discussing wrong, “that a few faulty memories will not themselves shake my conviction in what I’ve said….”5 He could, no doubt, say the same for a few misquotations. I am certainly not advocating misquoting texts. I do wonder, however, if the misquotation was as inadvertent as Urbas, and Porte, seem to suppose. As Urbas himself acknowledges, Cavell accurately quoted the exact same passage several times previous to the misquotation of it, so, in some sense, Cavell knows what the passage says. My real point is that Urbas’ intention to get Emerson ‘right,’ to offer “a historical, biographical, and textual reconstruction of Emerson’s metaphysics,”6 already strikes me as getting Emerson fundamentally wrong. Not “wrong,” exactly, but, useless, useless to me, in any event. I have no use for a seriously religious, metaphysical, and non-skeptical  Ibid.  Ibid., 559. 5  Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), xxiv. 6  Joseph Urbas, Emerson’s Metaphysics: A Song of Laws and Causes (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2016), xix. 3 4

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Emerson. Such a reading of Emerson—to claim that, that is Emerson’s overall message—strikes me, although Emerson certainly adopts positions that sound like those in certain moods, as, as fanciful as anything Cavell has imagined, which is not to say that I think that there is no space on the scholarly landscape for such a reading of Emerson. I am not even saying that Urbas’ book on Emerson is a bad book or that his project is not an important project. I actually think it is. But, I do want to say, that what Urbas is doing is Emerson scholarship. There certainly are criteria for accuracy and rightness in doing scholarship. And, to a scholar, as Emerson well knew, a Thinker just looks irresponsible. What Cavell is doing is not scholarship, although, for me, Cavell is the best scholar of Emerson, the scholar I most enjoy reading on Emerson. What Cavell is doing with Emerson is Thinking. Cavell is, along with Thoreau and Whitman, The American Scholar that Emerson calls for in “The American Scholar.” Cavell describes his own project of writing about Emerson as “to reappropriate… Emerson as a philosophical writer.”7 The work that follows has three parts. In the first I do my own work to reappropriate Emerson as a philosophical writer. Much of the best, most insightful, writing on Emerson comes from people who are in English departments. People like Stephen Whicher, Barbara Packer, Sharon Cameron, Branka Arsić, Lee Rust Brown, Susan Dunston, and Austin Bailey are all people writing helpfully on Emerson, but their primary background and their institutional affiliation is with an English department. As much as I have learned from them, they think in terms of different texts and different problems from the texts and problems I think in terms of. In Cavell, I recognize the same texts and problems that I was trained in, but I do not agree with Cavell that the problem of skepticism is the most interesting lens through which to read Emerson, or even that Emerson has as an ultimate goal something like moral perfectionism. Furthermore, there are some different thinkers with whom I would like to think Emerson, and some of the same thinkers as Cavell, but with different emphases, so I want to make my own case for Emerson as a philosopher. I do this, in part, by arguing that Emerson is addressing ancient and abiding philosophical problems and texts. I also do this by simply thinking of Emerson in relation to some major philosophical thinkers and find parallels, mutual and reciprocal insights about the nature of philosophy and the world. 7

 Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (), 12.

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The second section is on Emerson as a postmodern thinker, just the thing Urbas disdains. I do very much read Emerson from the present, with a present-mind. I think Emerson is precisely the thinker we need in our chaotic, confusing, despair-inducing present. I read Emerson as, ultimately, a philosopher of joy. “The joy of the spirit indicates its strength,”8 says Emerson. Joy seems hard to come by these days and I believe picking up a volume of Emerson can really help. Cavell has referred to Emerson’s “obscurity” and his “esotericism.” I think Emerson is hard to read, especially if you want to and expect to understand what he is saying; if you want to get Emerson right. I do not believe there is any getting Emerson right, but there are many, many uses to be made of Emerson. A surprising phenomenon I have discovered in reading Emerson is that when I pick up an Emerson essay to read, an essay I may have read a dozen or dozens of times before, I will find my copy of the essay filled with underlining and marginal commentary. Upon rereading the essay, however, I discover that the one line I have never underlined is THE important line in the essay. I wonder at the person who read the essay so many times before and missed the importance of THIS line. That happens to me every single time I reread an Emerson essay. The uberty, to use a Peirce word, of an Emerson essay is endless and limitless. Reading Emerson as postmodern only means that I read his fundamental concerns to be to discover the subterranean paths of real power, especially of thinking, and to undo the many forms of oppression that dominate above ground. More specifically, I see Emerson’s commitment to discovering the secret powers of the individual, and that he finds oppression as always associated with groups of people. As Stephen Whicher says, “The opposite and enemy of the sovereign self, as Emerson recognized in ‘Self-­ Reliance,’ is the community.”9 That is why I believe that the adult Emerson was always suspicious of religion, because religion meant groups of religious people and people working in groups were always more or less dangerous. The same can be said of metaphysical movements. That Emerson was fascinated by the invisible workings behind the visible world cannot be denied. But any formulation of that into a system, a system that has its shibboleths for identifying insiders and outsiders, Emerson was going to 8  Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Wm. Wise & Co. 1929), 601. 9  Stephen E.  Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), 60.

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avoid. That, in my opinion, is the point of the very explicitly philosophical essay “Nominalist and Realist.” There is something to be said for being, sometimes, a Nominalist. There is something to be said for being, sometimes, a Realist. There is something to be said for being, alternately, a Nominalist and then a Realist and then a Nominalist again. There is nothing to be said for being either and only a Nominalist or a Realist. To those who would be Emerson offers the following wonderful, cryptic, and amusing benediction: Could they but once understand, that I loved to know that they existed, and heartily wished them Godspeed, yet out of my poverty of life and thought, had no word or welcome for them when they came to see me, and could well consent to their living in Oregon, for any claim I felt on them, it would be a great satisfaction.10

Socrates could not summon more irony to distance himself from the hubris of the non-skeptical. Jean-François Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, says, “I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”11 That is really all of postmodernism that I want to use, but that is a lot and it is a lot for Emerson. The problem with metanarratives, I want to say, is that metanarratives are all about making people into groups, and groups of people oppress other groups of people. Another problem with metanarratives is that they shut down thinking. Metanarratives are systems of shibboleths that are primarily concerned with keeping insiders inside and outsiders outside. To stay inside the metanarrative means thinking in a very specific way, which, of course, as far as Emerson is concerned, is not really thinking at all. That is mere conformity. I see Emerson’s postmodern project to be to reveal the internal and external inconsistencies of various metanarratives, metanarratives about religion, metanarratives about capitalism, metanarratives about gender, metanarratives about truth, metanarratives about race, metanarratives, in general. But, and this is a very important addition, in my opinion, Emerson is not just saying ‘No.’ to metanarratives, he is also and always saying ‘Yes!’ to authentic thinking.  Emerson, Essays, 587.  Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv. 10 11

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Thinking is what constitutes power for Emerson. The debate about what constitutes authentic power goes back, at least, to Plato’s Gorgias. In the Gorgias Socrates argues with three sophists, one of whom is extremely famous and successful as a sophist, namely Gorgias, but Polus will chime in when Gorgias falters, and Callicles will take the argument to the end. All three sophists basically agree that true power is power to do whatever you want and that, that involves having power over other people. There are differences and permutations on that idea between the three, but that is the basic idea upon which they all agree. To their growing amazement, Socrates completely disagrees. First of all, Socrates will argue, people do not even know what they really want, so getting what they think they want but do not really want cannot be power. Second of all, power has nothing to do with other people. For Socrates, real power is something internal to a person, a kind of self-control, call it having the ability to, or knowing how, to think. Socrates describes the internal good in two ways, first negatively, then positively. The negative formulation of the internal good is to be able to recognize and not want to do what is unjust. As Socrates says to Polus, “neither you nor I nor any other person would take doing what’s unjust over suffering it, for it really is something worse.”12 For my purposes in discussing Emerson, I will understand doing something unjust in terms of perpetuating oppression. So, being able to recognize injustice or oppression and recognizing that it is in our own best interest not to participate in or want anything to do with them is a form of thinking. Socrates later gives a more positive account of what it means to possess an internal good, to have internal power. Socrates makes an analogy between the health of the body and the health of the soul: I think that the name for the states of organization of the body is “healthy,” as a result of which health and the rest of body excellence come into being in it…. And the name for the states of organization and order of the soul is “lawful” and “law,” which lead people to become law-abiding and orderly, and these are justice and self-control.13

12  Plato, Gorgias, translated by Donald J. Zeyl, in Plato: Complete Works edited by John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 820 (475e). 13  Plato, Gorgias, 848-49 (504c).

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The more positive account of real power is an internal organization in the soul, an organization that I associate with thinking. Real power comes from thinking. This might seem somewhat ironic to apply to Emerson since what seems to characterize his essays is disorder. On the contrary, however, I would argue that what characterizes Emerson’s essays is not disorder, but the avoidance of a foolish consistency, the avoidance of conformity to the thought of others that would shut down real thought altogether. Emerson’s soul is perfectly organized to maximize thinking. We think, according to Emerson, by analogies: “man is an analogist”14 Emerson says in Nature, and in “The American Scholar,” “science is nothing but the finding of analogy”15 and in “Poetry and Imagination,” “All thinking is analogizing.”16 In analogy we find in something we do not recognize something we do. It is the process of seeing something ‘like,’ something similar to what we do know in what we do not know. Analogy is the dialectic of same and difference. In the third section of this work, I think Emerson in conjunction with another thinker in a surprising and, I hope, fruitful way. I think Emerson in conjunction with Slavoj Žižek or Luce Irigaray, or Octavio Paz, or Jacques Derrida. In one sense, these connections are not so surprising. All of the thinkers I think with Emerson are also contesting one metanarrative or another, and so, are, in some sense, doing postmodern work, whether they self-identify as a postmodernist or not, which most do not. The goal of these conjunctions is two-fold, to find in Emerson’s work interventions, contributions, uses that are absolutely helpful in our present moment, but also to illuminate features of the more contemporary thinkers that may seem obscure or esoteric. Emerson’s philosophy, not without its own obscurities and esotericism, can also serve to clarify and make accessible, because of its familiarity, the unclear and apparently inaccessible philosophies of others. Finally, in putting Emerson together with these other philosophers a third thing, dialectically, emerges, a third that transcends Emerson or, for example, Žižek.

 Emerson, Essays, 21.  Emerson, Essays, 55. 16  Emerson, Essays, 731. 14 15

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Emerson’s Method Mary Oliver identifies what she calls a “trick” in Emerson’s writing: …it is no simple matter to be both inspirational and moderate. Emerson’s trick—I use the word in no belittling sense—was to fill his essays with “things” at the same time that his subject was conceptual, invisible, no more than a glimmer, but a glimmer of immeasurable sharpness inside the eye. So he attached the common word to the startling idea.17

I really like this as a description of Emerson’s method, although I would not call it a “trick.” It is rather the very substance of his essays. His essays, his thinking, which I will argue are essentially the same thing, are dialectical. Emerson’s word for the dialectical nature of the world and thought was “polarity”: The great principle of Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; and as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity,—these ‘fits of easy transmission and reflection,’ as Newton called them, are the law of nature because they are the law of spirit.18

Emerson’s mixing the human with the nonhuman, the animate with the inanimate, nature with spirit is doing just what Oliver describes, mixing ‘things’ with ‘the startling idea.’ This idea that Emerson’s thinking is dialectical is not original to me. Almost everyone sees that Emerson not only speaks of polarity but also in some sense enacts it in his writing. Whicher does. In describing the “geography of Emerson’s mind,” Whicher says that “His favorite image of polarity is inescapable.”19 Cavell does. Cavell explicitly links Emerson’s dialectical thinking with Hegel’s, “…annul here, I feel sure, alludes to the Hegelian term for upending antitheses (aufheben), or what Emerson calls our polarity, our aptness to think in opposites….”20 Arsić reads Emerson as enacting a “dialectics of 17  Mary Oliver, “Emerson: An Introduction” in New Moring: Emerson in the Twenty-First Century edited by Arthur S. Lothstein & Michael Brodrick (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 6. 18  Emerson, Essays, 62. 19  Whicher, Freedom and Fate, 57. 20  Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes edited by David Justin Hodge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 72-3.

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departing-arriving or ending-beginning.”21 Packer, after identifying the principle of ‘polarity’ says, “Emerson would try to assimilate his system of contraries to his favorite philosophical distinction.” She then goes on to identify six terms for “recording the discontinuous splendors of the inner life”: “Reason, transparence, and coincidence versus Understanding, opacity, and dislocation.”22 R.  A. Yoder in “Emerson’s Dialectic” says, “for Emerson dialectic and philosophy were practically synonymous.”23 My own way of describing the dialectic of Emerson’s thinking and writing is to use Peirce’s categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness which describe a logic in which a homeostatic state, Firstness, is interrupted by an incoming sign, that initiates and sustains thinking, Secondness, until some resolution is achieved, whereby the unaccountable sign is accounted for, which is Thirdness, and Thirdness itself gradually slides into, once again, Firstness. That is what thinking is for Peirce, and, I will argue, Peirce seems to have gotten that idea for what thinking is from Emerson. A final point about Emerson’s method is that Emerson enacts thinking in his essays. This is a thing that Cavell certainly sees, but, it is my impression, many readers of Emerson do not. Cavell explicitly calls Emerson’s writing thinking, or rather, poses it as a question, “why call this writing thinking?”24 But Cavell also repeatedly refers to Emerson ‘enacting’ the thinking he is describing. In discussing Emerson’s essay “Fate,” Cavell describes Emerson’s writing as “a philosophical enactment of freedom.”25 Later, in the same essay, Cavell says that “Emerson’s authorship enacts…a relationship with his reader of moral perfectionism….”26 My own vocabulary for this enactment in the writing of what the writing is about will be to speak of the ‘enunciated’ as recapitulated in the ‘enunciation,’ the content of what Emerson is saying is also contained in the form of his way of saying it. Emerson will talk about how thinking and the world are dialectical in an essay that will careen from one claim to its opposite, dialectically, 21  Branka Arsić, On Leaving: A Reading of Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 9. 22  Barbara Packer, Emerson’s Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays (New York: Continuum, 1982), 77. 23  R.  A. Yoder, “Emerson’s Dialectic” in Criticism, Fall 1969, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Fall 1969), 315. 24  Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 13. 25  Ibid., 18. 26  Ibid., 26.

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in a few pages. For some this appears as a problem for Emerson, or, at least, a problem for reading Emerson, but I want to say it is not a problem but the solution to the problem. What is the problem? The problem is oppression, and because of oppression, impotence, and despair. In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson speaks of a “foolish consistency,” but it is as apt, I believe, from Emerson’s perspective, to say ‘consistency itself is foolish.’ The problem with consistency, in a world that is not consistent, is that to insist on, to maintain consistency, at some point, one has to deny thought, and the denial of thought always oppresses. But why is it specifically ‘foolish’ and not just oppressive? John Donne in his great Meditation XVII says, “any man’s death diminishes me,” only to conclude the thought with the beautiful, “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee,” appropriated by Hemingway for a novel title. I will argue, in the section of thinking Emerson in relation to Simone de Beauvoir, that Emerson will make a similar claim. His claim will run, as it were, “never send for who is oppressed, any person’s oppression oppresses me.” If consistency oppresses, and I and Emerson will insist that it does, then demanding consistency of others oppresses me, hence it is a foolish demand. Just as a quick example of how very astute readers can miss this dimension of Emerson’s writing I would like to consider a footnote in Sharon Cameron’s wonderful essay on Emerson’s “Experience,” “Representing Grief: Emerson’s ‘Experience’”: Within each of these essays it makes sense that Emerson’s attitude would shift. What is unaccountable about the shifts is that they remain unremarked upon. One might say of these shifts that they are unconceded—in that they are unrecognized—at any rate they are unnoted, treated as if they were nonexistent, as if the discrepant statements between which the essay vacillates occupy such different registers as never to have come into contact at all. What is unaccountable is that in “Circles,” “Self-Reliance,” and “Compensation” Emerson treats contradictory statements as if they were complimentary statements.27

Cameron is obviously confounded by Emerson’s unaccountable and apparently un-self-aware slippage into contradiction. How can he be so foolishly inconsistent? My point is that, that is Emerson being consistent. 27   Sharon Cameron, “Representing Grief: Emerson’s ‘Experience,’” Representations, Summer 1986, No. 15, 39.

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His message is that consistency is itself foolish and so he will not do it. If you do not understand that, then Emerson is going to be mighty hard to make sense of. In my own reading of Emerson I try to be alert to the way the enunciated is recapitulated in the enunciation, or even that, in the enunciation there is sometimes more content than is given in the enunciated. Emerson records in his Journal in 1837, “I say to Lidian that in composition the What is of no importance compared with the How.”28 That is just a restatement, explicitly given by Emerson, of the relative values of the enunciated and the enunciation.

My Method My method, first of all, is to try to be attentive to what is given in the enunciation and to test that against what is given in the enunciated. Another aspect of my method is what I am describing as thinking Emerson’s philosophy with other philosophers, some from the tradition, some that are much more recent, some that may not be universally recognized as philosophers at all. By “thinking Emerson’s philosophy with other philosophers” I mean finding similar ideas, finding similar ways of expressing different ideas, exploring the proliferation of ideas that the conjunction of Emerson’s philosophy with other philosophers produces. My hope is that in connecting Emerson with other philosophers a third thing will emerge, something greater than either, not greater as in a greater idea so much as greater as enacting the greatest potentiality of thought which is to produce a new thought. I prefer not to read Emerson as metaphysical, although I can see many reasons to do so and I agree that the vocabulary of metaphysics fits a lot of what Emerson says. I prefer to read Emerson not as a metaphysician but as a semiotician. Peirce says, “all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.”29 That is the world, I understand, Emerson was trying to think his way through. For that reason, Peirce is a 28  Emerson’s Journals, quoted in F.  O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford, 1941), 14. 29  Charles Sanders Peirce, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893-1913) edited by the Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 394. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vol. I-VI, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Vol. VII-VIII, ed. Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). References to the Collected Papers will be given in the usual manner of volume number and paragraph number, in this case, CP profusion of signs.

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major touchstone for me in my reading of Emerson. Peirce was certainly influenced by Emerson, how much it is hard to say exactly, but my sense is that it was quite a lot. In any event, Peirce provides a more orthodox (although not very orthodox) philosophical vocabulary for describing what I think Emerson is talking about and so I find it useful to sometimes bring in Peirce to talk about Emerson. Another element of my method that might strike some as unscholarly is that there are digressions. Two notable digressions, in a chapter ostensibly on Emerson as a philosopher, are when I go into considerable detail thinking about Emerson’s formative experience in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and explicating a passage from Emerson’s poem “The Sphinx.” Both of these are origin stories, and specifically about the origins of thinking. Where thoughts come from and how we are able to think thoughts are great philosophical mysteries. Plato and Aristotle wondered at these mysteries. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is all about that mystery. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations can be read as an extended meditation on the question of how aspects of things occur to us. There is the world and there are our thoughts about the world, but there seems to be an explanatory gap, even a phenomenological gap, between our thoughts and the world. One form this problem takes is indicated by the question, how are we able to learn anything new? This question is a version of what is known as Meno’s paradox. As Meno asks Socrates, “How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know?”30 In Plato’s Timaeus, a dialogue about the origins of things, including both the world and our thoughts about the world, Plato introduces a strange terminology of the khôra and the chiasmus to identify a space and a movement between something like thought and the world. Aristotle has a theory about the conversion of the potential into the actual that operates on the physical level as nutrition, but also on the intellectual level as thought. Peirce has a, what at first may strike one as bizarre, theory of how future potential ideas influence our present ideas. I see Emerson’s experience at the Jardin des Plantes as, as it were, khôric and chiasmic, as well as his musings on the riddle of the Sphinx, and so worthy of some extended thinking. A final thing I will say about my own method is that, as with Emerson and Cavell, there is a lot of repetition. Gregg Lambert’s essay “Emerson,  Plato, Meno, translated by G. M. A. Grube in Plato: Complete Works, 880 (80d).

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or Man Thinking” is a precursor to my own work in this book. Lambert reads Emerson in light of Cavell, but also, and more strikingly, in light of Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. That is something very similar to what I am trying to do with people like Žižek and Derrida. Lambert uses Nietzsche as a mediating link between Emerson and Deleuze. I mostly do without mediating links, although Nietzsche could be that link for me, but I am happy if ideas proliferate. Lambert, glossing Deleuze, says, “one can say something new only by means of repetition itself.”31 I understand this to be a version of what I understand Emerson to be saying about thinking by analogy. We can only make sense of the new and the unfamiliar by using as a resource the old and the familiar. A permutation on this idea is that something we have said once can acquire new meanings by repeating it in a new context and in relation to other, a different set of, ideas. There are certain ideas in Emerson that I keep coming back to, but I intend them to be returns that signal a difference. More pointedly, I quote the same passage from Emerson sometimes multiple times. There are sentences and thoughts expressed by Emerson that seem to me bottomless and ever relevant. I will just mention two that will be repeated a number of times in the work that follows. One is Emerson saying in “Nominalist and Realist,” “Every man is wanted, no man is wanted much.”32 I really cannot get enough of that idea and its repetition does not seem like a repetition to me, but something original and profound each time I come to it. Another is, from “Circles,” “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”33 I use this as a kind of mantra, substituting “my life” for “our life.” If I had to sum up Emerson’s philosophy in one sentence, this is the sentence I would use.

31  Gregg Lambert, “Emerson, or Man Thinking” in The Other Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2010), 239. 32  Emerson, Essays, 583. 33  Ibid., 403.

PART I

Emerson as Philosopher

CHAPTER 2

Emerson as Philosopher

Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base; the one, and the two. –1. Unity, or Identity; and 2. Variety. We unite all things, by perceiving the law which pervades them; by perceiving the superficial differences, and the profound resemblances. But every mental act, —this very perception of identity or oneness, recognizes the difference of things. Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak, or to think, without embracing both.1 —Emerson, “Plato; Or, The Philosopher” For such reasons, the coming century may well make evident what is just now dawning, that Emerson is not only a philosopher but that he is the Philosopher of Democracy.2 —John Dewey, “Emerson—The Philosopher of Democracy”

What Emerson says philosophy is, in the quotation I have used as an epigraph, is a description, as the quotation indicates with “every mental act,” of thinking in general. Philosophy, then, is for Emerson, thinking. Or, as he describes it in “The American Scholar,” “Man Thinking”3 (the italics  Ibid., 637  John Dewey, “Emerson—The Philosopher of Democracy,” The International Journal of Ethics, July, 1903, Vol. 13, No. 4 (July 1903), 412. 3  Emerson, Essays, 54. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Gilmore, Emerson as Philosopher, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32546-5_2

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are Emerson’s, and the gendered designation of the human I will deal with later). I take it that since not all of the thoughts that go through a person’s head in a day are philosophy, that “philosophy” designates some particular and distinctive way of thinking, that not all thoughts are “mental acts.” That would mean that “philosophy” is a term for a kind of pure thinking, thinking as thinking. Furthermore, still working with the epigraph quotation, that this pure thinking is dialectical, a movement between Unity and Variety, recognizing Oneness amidst a diversity and diversity in the Oneness. Plato’s Form of the Good calls forth Aristotle’s The Parts of Animals as sure as Two follows One. Finally, that this dialectic of One and Variety is characteristic of not just our thought but also of the world, or maybe even, of the world as our mind is able to constitute it, which is a very Kantian and postmodern thought indeed. To make that thought even more complicated, and it is in this direction, at least as I read him, Emerson’s thinking always goes, not only does our mind constitute the world, but the world constitutes our mind in a kind of mutual, reciprocal dance of entanglement until there is no distinguishing my mind from the world or the world from my mind. That, as I read him, is Emerson’s philosophy in a nutshell, and also, what philosophy is. Emerson is not generally taken for a philosopher. This is a cause of some, it seems like, dismay, for Stanley Cavell. I invoke Cavell because he would seem to be most definitely a philosopher and he is the philosopher that most recently argues most forcefully for reading Emerson as a philosopher. Cavell, as a full professor in the Harvard philosophy department and a past president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, would seem to be a paradigmatic example of an American philosopher. I use the qualifier “seems,” however, because Cavell himself had some concerns about how seriously he was taken as a philosopher in America by his fellow American academic philosophers. American academic philosophy is dominated by the American-British analytic philosophy tradition, and to that tradition, what Cavell does, does indeed look suspicious. It does not look like philosophy proper. I take Cavell’s dismay at the fact that Emerson is largely not taken seriously as a philosopher by American academic philosophers to have two sources. The first source is how great Cavell thinks Emerson is as a philosopher, especially as an American philosopher, writing foundational texts of uniquely American philosophy, but also containing deep wisdoms for people everywhere about what it means to be a human being and about how to be a human being. The second source of dismay for Cavell, and I

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am psychologizing a little bit here, is that if academic philosophers cannot take Emerson seriously as a philosopher, then they will have a hard time taking Cavell’s work seriously as philosophy too. Cavell’s case for Emerson as a philosopher, I am saying, is also a case Cavell is making for what he does as philosophy. One way that Cavell makes a case for Emerson as a philosopher is by situating him within the history of Western philosophy. Cavell finds in Emerson’s essays signs of specific philosophical opponents, most frequently, for Cavell, Descartes, and Kant. Cavell also finds continuations of Emerson’s thought in philosophers who come after him, especially Nietzsche, and through Nietzsche, Heidegger, and then more recently in the work of Austin and Wittgenstein. Cavell acknowledges that his reading of Emerson as intentionally doing philosophy, that Emerson is actually alluding to specific philosophers in his essays and to specific philosophies, that he is intentionally doing philosophy that is meant to be taken as seriously as philosophers read the philosophies of Descartes or Kant, is going to be a hard sell for his American academic peers. As Cavell says, …readers of Emerson whose expertise I respect have simply denied that such allusions are, even if in some way intended, to be taken as serious philosophical observations on Emerson’s part. And the ground of denial has mainly been, I think it is fair to say, that it simply makes no sense to suppose that Emerson, famously intimidated by formal argument, could, in principle, mean to be taking on and questioning, or modifying, even perhaps significantly parodying, signature thoughts of Descartes and of Kant.4

But this is precisely the sell that Cavell will make, even as he acknowledges that “it is obvious that Emerson does not sound like what, especially in the Anglo-American tradition, we are accustomed to think of as philosophy.”5 And then Cavell asks the question, “Why be so insistent?” Good question. I will give a very brief gloss on what I take Cavell’s answer to that question to be. It will take the rest of this book to give my own answer to that question. Of course, to answer that question will require defining what philosophy is and what philosophers do that make what they do philosophy. If the general population of Anglo-American philosophers does not see Emerson as doing philosophy, then it will 4 5

 Stanley Cavell, Etudes, 2.  Ibid.

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require a reconceiving of what philosophy is to make the case that Emerson is a philosopher. That is really the argument that Cavell, and that Cavell and I would argue, Emerson, is making. What, then, is this reconceiving of philosophy? It should certainly be at least consistent with all the old conceptions of philosophy, if not necessarily with certain assumptions about philosophy that come out of the Anglo-American tradition of philosophy. One answer that Cavell gives, an idea he gets from Heidegger, is that philosophy is essentially thinking. What makes a particular form of thinking philosophical is, for Cavell, that it has a certain characteristic of self-­ reflexivity, or self-consciousness, or self-awareness. So, to clarify, what makes philosophical thinking philosophical is that it is a thinking that has a dimension of thinking about thinking. Cavell connects this way of understanding philosophy with the philosophies of Socrates and Wittgenstein, which strike me as pretty good candidates as exemplars for identifying what characterizes philosophy in general. If this reconceiving of philosophy is consistent with what philosophers from Socrates to Wittgenstein actually do as philosophy, that would seem to have a certain credibility as a conception of philosophy. This is the way Cavell puts it: If Socrates (along with a line of others extending at least to Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations) is right, and philosophy knows only what anyone knows or could know by bethinking themselves of what they say and do, then it manifests itself in writing—or thinking—that can be said either to be without authority (that shuns authority) or, put otherwise, that authorizes only itself by continuing to question itself, to bethink itself, after all the others who claim philosophy’s attention (in Plato’s image at the close of his Symposium) have fallen asleep.6

A very Cavellian idea expressed in a very Cavellian way. One has to develop a taste for Cavell’s way of writing, which is, of course, Cavell’s way of thinking. I read Cavell thinking here in this passage about a reconceiving of what philosophy is, but based on what philosophers have always done, using Socrates, Wittgenstein, and somewhat less explicitly or directly, Plato as examples. What Cavell is saying philosophy is, is a form of thinking that includes a thinking about oneself thinking, one’s authority for thinking, and one’s author-izing one’s thinking in writing,  Ibid., 3.

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specifically, writing philosophy, which recapitulates one’s thinking about one’s thinking. The apparently off-hand and slightly strange reference to Plato’s Symposium makes, I think, a very nice Nietzschean point about philosophy which is that a thing that distinguishes philosophers from non-­ philosophers or philosophical thinking from non-philosophical thinking is that philosophers thinking philosophically go farther in their thinking than most people are willing to go in their thinking. A significant element in this re-conception of philosophy is Cavell’s insistence on the thinking that is “continuing to question itself.” This self-­ questioning, this self-doubt, engages a major theme of Cavell’s own philosophy, and one that Cavell claims for Emerson’s philosophy, which is the theme of skepticism. Even here Cavell reconceives the topic of skepticism, at least as it is generally understood in the Anglo-American tradition. For Cavell the issue of skepticism is only indirectly an issue of epistemology. For Cavell, the issue of skepticism is much more of an existential, emotional, and psychological issue than a question of how we can be sure that we know what we think we know or what it is we can be said to know or whether knowledge is even possible. He refers to his concern with the question of skepticism as an “obsession,”7 and associates the question of skepticism with a “sense of intimacy with existence, or intimacy lost,”8 especially with the latter. This leads to his preoccupation with the “ordinary,” so that he entitles one of his books In Quest of the Ordinary,9 which is an extraordinary title for a book. Cavell says: The confrontation of skepticism provides a way of grasping why this emphasis on the ordinary keeps recurring. Speaking of ordinary or everyday language as natural language expresses something we would like to understand as, I might say, a natural relation to nature. It is this relation from which the skeptic’s doubts distance us, so that his dissatisfaction in replacing this natural relation with a construction of certainty after the fact is so far a correct dissatisfaction. The recurrent appeal to ordinary or natural language in the history of philosophy is the sign that there is some inner wish of philosophy to escape as well as to recover the natural.10

 Ibid., 21.  Ibid., 23. 9  Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988). 10  Emerson, Etudes, 23. 7 8

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There are a couple of things that I would like to say about this dense passage. First, this sense of a loss of the natural and of a search for nature connects this passage with Emerson. After his formative experience at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris which Emerson recorded in his diary with the exclamation “I will be a naturalist!” all of his writings, I will argue, were based on a philosophy of nature. His first book was simply titled Nature, and that was the overt or covert subject of all of his writings and lectures. He had a philosophy of nature that he first laid out in Nature, and which he developed throughout his writing life culminating in his final major written text, A Natural History of the Intellect. Another point that I want to make about the Cavell quotation is that for Cavell skepticism is not exactly a mistake or an error. It is, as he says in the quotation, “a so far correct dissatisfaction.” I understand that to mean that bouts of skepticism are all but inevitable for us human beings, that there is something in the nature of the human that makes us susceptible to, even prone to skepticism. But, and this is where ordinary language philosophy comes in for Cavell, it is not necessary for us to remain in that condition and that a recovery of our confidence in the reality of the world, a recovery of the world itself, is available to us and ordinary language philosophy offers some techniques for effecting that recovery. Finally, I want to emphasize a point that is implicit in what I have said above, which is that there is some deep ambiguity in us, in our human being, that seems to force us into skepticism, but also to make possible our recovery from skepticism, and that it is essential to what philosophy is that it works towards both, towards skepticism and towards the recovery from skepticism. That is how I understand Cavell’s claim that “there is some inner wish of philosophy to escape as well as to recover the natural.” This inner ambiguity Emerson (along with Slavoj Žižek) will call a “crack,”11 and this crack is something that he will find in Nature as well as in us. Cavell associates this inner ambiguity with “the denial of the human.” “I have then gone on to acknowledge that the denial of the human, the wish to escape the conditions of humanity, call them conditions of finitude, is itself only human.”12 This invocation of the human condition calls up for me the philosophy of existentialism, for which there is no human essence, but only a human condition, and for which philosophy the most 11  Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 10. Emerson, Essays, 292. 12  Emerson, Etudes, 23.

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significant part of our condition is our finitude, the fact of our death. My own reading of Emerson’s philosophy is that he is a profoundly existentialist philosopher. There are certainly elements of stoicism in Emerson’s writings. Cavell finds strains of romanticism in them. There are passages that sound like pure Idealism, and, no doubt, there are skeptical passages, but, on my reading of Emerson, he is predominantly an existential and pragmatic philosopher, and pragmatic precisely because existential. That is, his existentialism, his anti-essentialism, is itself a version of pragmatism, but also, that anti-essentialism poses a problem for us as human beings. If we have no essence, nothing that it is essential for us to be, what are we to be? What are we to do? Emerson seeks and offers answers to precisely those questions. His goal, as I read him, is the very pragmatic goal of amelioration. The human condition into which we are thrown at birth is a source of a great deal of anxiety and suffering. Emerson offers a philosophy of joy. Interestingly, or, at least, interesting to me, Cavell resists the connection of Emerson with pragmatism. He says: No one can sensibly deny that Emerson was a muse of pragmatism. But to my mind the assimilation of Emerson to pragmatism unfailingly blunts the particularity, the achievement, of Emerson’s language, in this sense precisely shuns the struggle for philosophy—for, I might say, the right to philosophize, to reconceive reason—that Emerson sought to bequeath.13

I take Cavell’s point. To read Emerson as a kind of proto-, a not-yet-­ quite-there, pragmatist diminishes Emerson, and misses Emerson. I do not read Emerson that way. Rather, I find the best ideas of pragmatism already in Emerson, so that we have more to learn about pragmatism from Emerson than we have to learn about Emerson from pragmatism. Specifically, I find in the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, the putative founder of pragmatism, great resources for reading and understanding Emerson’s philosophy. There have been a number of articles published fairly recently arguing for a direct influence of Emerson on the philosophy of Peirce.14 Most focus on a lecture series that was sponsored by Harvard  Ibid., 7.  Three are: David A.  Dilworth, “Elective Affinities: Emerson’s ‘Natural History of Intellect’ and Peirce’s Synechism,” Cognitio, Vol, 11, No. 1, (January, 2010), 22-47. Felicia Kruse, “Peirce, God, and the Transcendentalist Virus” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Summer 2010), 386-400. John Kaag, “Returning to the Unformed: Emerson and Peirce on the ‘Law of Mind’” Cognitio, Vol. 14, No. 2, (2013), 189-202 13 14

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(then) College, for which both Emerson and Peirce were invited lecturers. The year was 1870, when Emerson was 67 and Peirce 41. The title of Emerson’s lectures was “The Natural History of the Intellect.”15 I am grateful for this scholarship and find it compelling. I do not doubt the influence, but my approach is slightly different. My interest is in using Peirce’s philosophy to, as it were, open up Emerson’s philosophy by providing a vocabulary that is more explicitly philosophical and used in more explicitly philosophical arguments. I think Cavell is right that Emerson’s concern was always with the nature of thinking. I swerve away from Cavell’s reading of Emerson insofar as I do not see skepticism as so central to Emerson’s thought. I do not see thinking as so preoccupied with skepticism as Cavell does. I see thinking as much more about being ­fruitful, productive, even reproductive. This goal of productive, reproductive, thinking I take to be the goal of Emerson as well as of Peirce. It is a goal that makes all of their writing and lecturing, as it were, performative. They are doing what they are writing and talking about as they write and talk about it. They are showing how as much as explaining what the, what I will call following Peirce, the real is. The real itself is and is about thinking. I take the moment of realization about thinking for Emerson to emerge after his experience at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Robert Richardson calls it “a moment of vocational epiphany.”16 That strikes me as a beautiful description of the moment, the moment when something on the order of the divine is revealed, recognized, thought. In that moment Emerson recognizes his ‘calling,’ what was to be his vocation. Emerson will insist on this calling for the rest of his life. He will cleave to it with a kind of Luther-an determination and steadfastness, “Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise.” Many will try to lure or shame him away from his calling and he will always resist. To do otherwise would amount to, on my reading of Emerson, a renouncing of his whole philosophy, on the order of Socrates renouncing his philosophy at his trial. Just as for Socrates, there is nothing anyone can offer Emerson that is greater than his devotion to and satisfaction from his own thinking, which is, I might add, always a thinking about thinking. What Emerson saw in the Jardin des Plantes was Nature thinking. What he saw was that Nature had a few ideas that it was working through, over 15  Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 562. 16  Richardson, Emerson, 139.

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and over again. What he saw was that Nature was an essayist, an experimenter, a thinker. Here is a portion of what Emerson wrote in his journal after his experience in the Jardin des Plantes. I will quote an extended passage from the journal, even though much of it will be familiar to lovers of Emerson: Ah said I this is philanthropy, wisdom, taste—to form a Cabinet of natural history. Many students were there with grammar & notebook & a class of boys with their tutor from school. Here we were impressed with the inexhaustible riches of nature. The Universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms—the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, fishes, insects, snakes—& the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient in the very rock aping organized forms. Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in man the observer—an occult relation between the very scorpions and man. I feel the centipede in me—cayman, carp, eagle, & fox. I am moved by strange sympathies, I say continually “I will be a naturalist.”17

There are a number of things that I would like to note about this passage. First, he associates the creation of a Cabinet of natural history with “philanthropy, wisdom, taste.” One way that Emerson’s essays can be read is as items in a “Cabinet of natural history,” more specifically, a natural history of the intellect. Why “philanthropy”? Why “wisdom”? Why “taste”? All three virtues would seem to be facets of the same thing, of one virtue, which seems to be the virtue of finding man’s place in Nature. The question of what constitutes virtue and what vice will be an abiding concern of mine in this work, as it was, I believe, in all of what Emerson wrote. This is an initial laying out of the territory of virtue and vice. Virtue will derive from a proper understanding of the place of human beings in Nature, and vice the misreading of that relationship. The proper reading, the proper placing, will make one love human beings and nature, while the improper will lead to skepticism, distrust, prejudice against human beings and nature. The proper reading, placing, will be a form of wisdom, and wisdom as a form of life. What this wisdom is will take some time to spell out, but it will have something to do with the understanding and appreciation of what thinking is for Nature and what it is for human beings. Finally, this philanthropy and wisdom will be related to taste. They are rooted in  Emerson in his Journals, 111.

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the aesthetic. The aesthetic itself is rooted, I will say as an initial formulation, in a style of thinking, a style of seeing, a way of seeing the world. Second, Emerson notes the many students in the room and identifies with them, “Here we are impressed with the inexhaustible riches of nature.” ‘Scholar’ is from the Latin ‘schola,’ meaning ‘school.’ The scholar is one who is at school, and at school not as master but as student. Emerson will call for an American Scholar in his address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1837 published as “The American Scholar.” He is, of course, an American scholar, and his call for an American Scholar is a call for compatriots, for fellow inquirers, for companions in the search for the nature of the real from an American way of looking for it. This call will largely be futile. Like Socrates who says in Plato’s Lysis that he “would rather have a friend than all of Darius’ gold,” but then goes on, “And here I am, so far from having this possession…,”18 my sense is that Emerson too felt the lack of a true companion in thought, and lamented repeatedly in his essays discovering, after an initial sense of hope, the shallowness of most people he met. He could learn from anyone, he had many friends, but a true companion, a fellow scholar, an American scholar, like Diogenes of Sinope searching for an honest man, he could not find. Then, “The Universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever….” The universe as puzzle sets up one of the most powerful of Emerson’s allegories, the allegory of the Sphinx. It is an allegory that links Emerson with Peirce, who picks up the idea of Nature as Sphinx from Emerson. The Sphinx makes its first official appearance in Emerson’s first book Nature. “There sits the Sphinx at the road-side, and from age to age, as each prophet comes by, he tries his fortune at reading her riddle.”19 The Sphinx gets its most extended treatment by Emerson in the poem with that title which includes the following passage: The old Sphinx bit her thick lip,— Said, “Who taught thee me to name? I am thy spirit, yoke-fellow; Of thy eye I am eyebeam. “Thou art the unanswered question; Couldst see thy proper eye, Always it asketh, asketh; And each answer is a lie.  Plato, Lysis, 695-96.  Emerson, Essays, 25.

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So take thy quest through nature, It through thousand natures ply; Ask on, thou clothed eternity; Time is the false reply.”20

Many Emersonian themes resonate in these lines (and I will just mention that Peirce quotes some of these lines from the poem The Sphinx, more or less approvingly, in his 1894 paper “The Categories in Detail”21). Emerson adduces a number of ancient wisdoms. First and most obviously the wisdom in the story of the Sphinx, an even more ancient myth that occurs in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. The Sphinx presents Oedipus with a puzzle, a riddle, the answer to which is “Man.” In Emerson’s version, and I suppose in Sophocles’ version as well, the Sphinx is Nature. In Emerson’s version, the Sphinx’s riddle is presented in a slightly different form from the Sophocles version: “Thou art the unanswered question.” What is the “unanswered question” is the riddle. The answer is again “Man,” or even more particularly, “Me.” That is to say, each of us is the answer to the question presented by the Sphinx, a question that remains, for all the answer each of us is, unanswered. As he will say in “Nominalist and Realist,” “Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much.”22 Which is to say, Nature is an essayist, an experimenter, and each of us is an experiment conducted by Nature. To each of us Nature presents us with the possibility of perfecting the idea of what it means to be a human being. There is no such thing as a failed experiment. No experiment is expected to be final, to give a final answer to what it means to be a human being, or, for that matter, a cayman. Every experiment successfully conducted yields information, proposes, as it were, alternative possibilities for future experiments. We serve our function, we serve Nature’s function, by giving the best, which means, our own most idiosyncratic, possible answer to the question of what it might look like to be the perfect human being. “I am thy spirit, yoke-fellow” and “Of thy eye I am the eyebeam” is another ancient wisdom, going back at least to the Pythagoreans, which understands the relationship between the individual human being to the cosmos to be one of microcosm to macrocosm. The individual human being recapitulates the materials and processes of the universe. To  Emerson, Complete Emerson, “The Sphinx,” 842-43.  Peirce, CW, 1.310. 22  Emerson, Essays, 583. 20 21

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understand the universe as cosmos, contemplate oneself. To understand oneself, contemplate the universe as cosmos. The conversation is between the Sphinx and an unidentified, indeterminate, representative human being. That is the way Nature works. It works, as it were, conversationally. ‘Conversation,’ is a mutual turning (Latin vers) together (Latin con). Nature makes us what we are, we make Nature what it is. It is a mutual, reciprocal act of creation; a mutual, reciprocal act of reproduction. “Thy proper eye” would seem to be a reference to Plato’s idea in the Republic that we, as it were, do not see the real things because we are not looking with the proper eye. Plato does the metaphor, or more precisely in Plato’s formulation, simile, in a slightly different way. In Book VII Plato describes education as “like putting sight into blind eyes” or, more famously, “like an eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body.”23 The idea is the same and congruent with the Biblical idea, I would say, allegorized, in the Gospels of Matthew and John in which Jesus gives sight to a blind man. He does not say it, but he does not really have to, ‘none are so blind as those who will not see.’ So says the Sphinx as well, or at least a version of that. “And each answer is a lie.” True enough, if a bit of an overstatement. It leaves out the first part which is “every man is wanted” and just emphasizes the second part “and no man is wanted much.” This theme will be developed later by Emerson, and by me, in the idea of the ‘epistemology of circles.’ “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another circle can be drawn; and there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”24 Emerson will call this “the moral fact of the Unattainable.”25 Peirce will call this “fallibilism.” To deny it is what the existentialists call “bad faith.” ‘Bad faith’ is, to use Mark Twain’s colorful description of faith in general from Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar in Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World, “faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” To live in bad faith is what Simone de Beauvoir calls “seriousness,” and the person of bad faith the “serious” person. ‘Serious’ people are people who insist that their truth is THE TRUTH.  The ‘bad faith’ comes in when one considers all of the counter-indications to this conviction. If the counter-indications are  Plato, Republic, 518b-c.  Emerson, Essays, 403 25  Ibid. 23 24

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considered and taken seriously (this question of the ambiguities surrounding the concept of seriousness will be addressed later) some revision of one’s belief will be required, effectively making of one’s earlier belief “a lie.” “So take thy quest through nature, / It through thousand natures ply….” This is the Sphinx’s recommendation that one visit a Cabinet of natural history, or, better yet, go for a walk in the woods. It recapitulates the theme of microcosm and macrocosm: to understand the grand cosmos, pay attention to all of the mini-cosmos around you in Nature. To understand yourself, to understand what it means to be a human being, examine the centipede, cayman, and carp. “Ask on, thou clothed eternity; / Time is the false reply.” One form bad faith takes is being committed to one’s ‘intentions’ as opposed to being open to possible ‘receptions;’ a commitment to the “lust” for unearned authority, to be the source of all answers as opposed to the love of learning, the desire to be a scholar of Nature. A theme that emerges for Emerson in the address “The Method of Nature” is the theme of “ecstasy.” “Nature can only be conceived as existing to a universal and not to a particular end, to a universe of ends, and not to one,—a work of ecstasy, to be represented by a circular movement, as intention might be signified by a straight line of definite length.”26 Then a little later he says, “It is sublime to receive, sublime to love, but this lust of imparting as from us, this desire to be loved, the wish to be recognized as individuals,—is finite, comes of a lower strain.”27 Two distinctions are drawn in these passages, first, a distinction between being receptive to “ecstasy,” literally a standing or being outside oneself, versus the insistence on remaining oneself, remaining committed to one’s ‘intentions’ and resisting opportunities for ecstasy. The second distinction is between “lust” and “love” where ‘love’ represents an openness to ‘reception,’ and the attendant ecstasy, and ‘lust’ represents the determination to BE somebody to others, to stick to one’s ‘intentions,’ to avoid the seductions of ecstasy. We experience moments of ecstasy in Kairos time, which is to say, time for us ceases to exist and becomes infinite. Our determination to stick with our ‘intentions’ imprisons us in the tick tock time of Kronos. We are “clothed in eternity”: all of ecstatic Nature surrounds us. The denial of that is our saying “Time” and meaning: we have no time for ecstasy or Nature.  Ibid., 121.  Ibid., 125.

26 27

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Back to Emerson’s day at the Jardin des Plantes, “& the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient in the very rock aping organized forms.” Two points to make in response to this. First, David Dilworth claims that the essence of Emerson’s philosophy is contained in the dialectic of “identity” and “metamorphosis.”28 I accept that as, as good a gloss on what constitutes the essence of Emerson’s philosophy as any and you can hear an originary echo of it in “the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient.” A principle is a unity and the “upheaving” and “everywhere” point to a metamorphosing plurality. We will see this dialectic reemerging in everything Emerson writes. Second, the anthropomorphized (sort of, maybe, hominoideapomorphosed is better) “rock aping organized forms” suggests an idea that Peirce seems to have gotten from Emerson that matter is partially dead, or minimally alive mind. I will have more to say about that, but it is interesting that Emerson already has this idea visiting the Jardin des Plantes. “Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in man the observer—an occult relation between the very scorpions and man.” That what we see, what we can see, is an expression of a property in us, the observer, could be a gloss on Kant’s first Critique. But, clearly, Emerson means something more than just that. It is also an expression of moral identification with Nature and natural entities that makes us inseparable from the rest of Nature, and, in particular, from other creatures in Nature. What capitalism has wrought, through its monetizing of everything, every animal and thing, including space, air, water and the labor of people hence of people, and to which Christianity has contributed its own part via its dismissal of this world in favor of the next (Nietzsche’s complaint) and its designating humans as ‘stewards’ of the rest, our self-conception as separate from all of Nature, from the animals in Nature, and even from each other, Emerson would reunite. Finally, “I feel the centipede in me—cayman, carp, eagle, & fox. I am moved by strange sympathies, I say continually ‘I will be a naturalist.’” All truly ethical sympathies, all really moral sympathies, are “strange sympathies.” As Peirce says in his great essay “Evolutionary Love,” quoting Henry James, Sr., “‘It is no doubt very tolerable finite or creaturely love to love one’s own in another, to love another for his conformity to one’s self: but nothing can be in more flagrant contrast to the creative Love, all  Dilworth, “Elective Affinities,” 27.

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whose tenderness is most bitterly hostile and negative to itself.’”29 There are sympathies that are not strange, perfectly natural, and demand nothing of us, for they are sympathies that are expressions of our own self-love. To really love another as an Other, which, following James and Peirce, is the only sort of love that can really be understood as Love, will take strange sympathies. Such sympathies are not unnatural, exactly, but they take some cultivation and require an openness, say, a receptivity to the unexpected. As Emerson says in “Uses of Great Men” from Representative Men, “Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the otherest.”30 That italicized “otherest” is Emerson’s own. That will be a strange sympathy. That will be an encounter on the order of an encounter with a cayman. That will be a source of what Peirce calls “creative Love.” This is precisely what will be the basis of Thinking for Emerson and for Peirce. Emerson declares that he will become “a naturalist.” I take it that it his first official act as a naturalist is to write and then publish his first book, Nature (1836). Cavell does not read Nature as fully developed Emerson philosophy. He does not, predictably enough, because he does not see in Nature a sufficiently developed attitude toward skepticism. Cavell first says, “I am at present among those who find Nature, granted the wonderful passages in it, not yet to constitute the Emerson philosophical voice, but to be the place from which, in the several following years, that voice departs….” Cavell then explains himself: “I would characterize the difference by saying that in Nature Emerson is taking the issue of skepticism as solvable or controllable whereas thereafter he takes its unsolvability to be the heart of his thinking.”31 Since I do not see the problem of skepticism to be an essential part of Emerson’s project as naturalist, I do not have any reservations about finding in Nature Emerson’s authentic philosophical voice, although, having said that, since what Nature herself says is “I grow,” I would be loath to say that what he says in Nature is in any way final. It is only initial, but then I would say that also of his final work “The Natural History of the Intellect.” To say that it is initial is to say that it is the beginning of a thought. It is the tracking of a process of thinking that seeks an answer to a riddle and whatever answer it finds will be both  Peirce, CW, 6.287.  Emerson, Essays, 616. 31  Cavell, Etudes, 111-112. 29 30

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complete, a unity, and incomplete, “a lie,” which is to say, a starting point for a new line of thinking. I want to add a short digression to this line of already digressions to address another remark that Emerson makes in his journal for that day at the Jardin des Plantes, July 13, 1833. He describes his impression on first entering the Cabinet of Natural History as follows: “It is a beautiful collection & makes the visitor as calm and genial as a bridegroom.”32 I do not necessarily associate ‘bridegroom’ with “calm and genial,” and so I read this line as a description of Emerson’s own experience as a bridegroom. It is for me an odd connection, between walking into a museum full of skeletons and thinking of bridegrooms, with the added twist of the image of Emerson as a bridegroom, “calm and genial.” Of course, this description is written after the whole of his experience at the Jardin des Plantes, and so there is a dimension of the retroactive construction of the memory of the experience. The thought of a bridegroom invokes the erotic culmination to come, and so why so “calm and genial”? So much of the erotic is experienced as suspense, as uncertainty about where the relationship is going and whether it will ever get there, to, the, as it were, promised land. I suppose, as bridegroom, there is a sense of the promise all but kept. There is a relaxing of the suspense of the erotic in favor of an abiding until the moment of sequestration. Which is not to say that this abiding is not also erotic, charged with the expectation of an erotic consummation, but it would be a warm and expectant eros rather than the sometimes querulous eros that characterizes uncertain wooing. My point in all of this is that I see a dimension of the erotic in Emerson’s experiences of thinking. The ecstasies of thought have a certain erotic dimension. When Emerson famously, or even infamously, describes his experience of walking through the woods and becoming a “transparent eyeball”: “I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.” That description could as well go for a description of sexual ecstasy. Emerson’s ecstasy, I am saying, will always have a dimension of the erotic.

32  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, selected and edited by Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 110.

CHAPTER 3

Emerson on Thinking via Peirce and Beauvoir

Two resources that I will make use of in explaining what Emerson has in mind by ‘thinking’ are Peirce’s “categories” of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness and Simone de Beauvoir’s idea of the ethics of ambiguity and the failure of that ethics she calls “seriousness.” There is an ethics to thinking and the ethics of thinking involves the acknowledgement of ambiguity, which is just another way of saying that the ethics of thinking involves the acknowledgement of our inescapable fallibilism. To deny the ambiguity or our fallibilism is to be ‘serious.’ Of course, seriousness itself is ambiguous. For Aristotle, ethics was only possible for the ‘serious man,’ the spoudaios. I do not see Beauvoir disagreeing with that. I will say more about Beauvoir and seriousness later, but for now I will just say that for Beauvoir the highest moral attitude is that of what she calls the “artist.” Artists are serious about their art, if not about a lot of other things that non-artists are serious about. So the negative connotations of ‘seriousness’ that I get from Beauvoir and will use to identify what Emerson regards as the enemy of thinking must be taken as stipulative and specific. ‘Seriousness’ is meant to refer to a specific kind of insistent refusal to acknowledge ambiguity, which, said another way, is an insistent refusal to acknowledge the actual evidence. When Peirce analyzes the four methods of “fixing a belief” in “The Fixation of Belief,” the first three methods, the method of tenacity, the method of authority, and the method of a priority, are all guilty of some degree of ‘seriousness.’ They all involve the desire for a certain kind of belief and in the service of that belief will avoid or deny the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Gilmore, Emerson as Philosopher, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32546-5_3

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counter-evidence to that belief. The only really reliable method for fixing a belief, according to Peirce, is the method of science. The method of science is inherently fallibilistic and always open to new evidence. That is what Beauvoir calls the “ethics of ambiguity.” Emerson calls it “the moral sentiment.”1 It is what comprises the dynamics of what I call Emerson’s ‘epistemology of circles.’ In the essay “Circles,” my favorite of all of Emerson’s essays, Emerson identifies the ‘circle’ as a, or even the, “primary figure” of nature: “this primary figure is repeated without end.” From this idea he draws two morals. “One moral we have already deduced, in considering the circular or compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace; that every action admits of being outdone.” And then comes what is my favorite line in all of Emerson’s essays: Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.2

All of Emerson, it seems to me, is here. “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn,” if that is true then another circle can be drawn around this truth rendering this truth false. This seems to involve Emerson in the fallacy of the peritrope, a fallacy first identified by Plato in the Theaetetus. As Socrates points out in the Theaetetus, Protagoras claims that the judgment that ‘man is the measure of all things’ is true, but then, if it is true, then the person who contradicts him must also say the truth so that, as Socrates succinctly puts it, “the Truth of Protagoras is not true for anyone at all, not even for himself.”3 The idea is that for Protagoras there is no truth but one. All other truths get consumed by his universal relativism but one truth, the truth of universal relativism. Pyrrho and the skeptics were also accused of the peritrope fallacy, of saying that there is no truth, as though they were making a true judgment that there is no truth. This raises the issue of whether the skeptic can live her skepticism. Can a person really survive if they refuse to make 1  Emerson refers to the “moral sentiment” in many essays, but the first occurrence is in Nature, Essays, 29. 2  Ibid., 403. 3  Plato, Theaetetus, 171b-c.

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any judgments about anything, if they really toe the skeptical line? And is this even what Emerson is saying? If he is saying this then that would make him a good Postmodern. This is the primary complaint against the postmodernists, that they are relativists, that they do not believe in Truth. He seems to be saying this. In the very next paragraph he says, and this is the paragraph in full: This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at once the inspirer and the condemner of every success, may conveniently serve us to connect many illustrations of human power in every department.4

Again, this would seem to be a deeply contradictory claim. On the one hand, this passage seems to be describing an absolute human powerlessness, human impotence, and, on the other hand, it seems to suggest a source of ultimate human power, of all human power, and these seem to be the same thing, or coming from the same source. In the next paragraph he further emphasizes the universal instability, relativity, unfixability: “There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a work of degrees.”5 This sounds postmodern and skeptical, but is it? Is Emerson? Emerson himself says “no” to this suggestion of relativism and skepticism. In three paragraphs of what seem to me to be of immense density Emerson explicitly, if not completely clearly, denies being a Pyrrhonic skeptic: And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader claim, you have arrived at a fine Pyrrhonism, at an equivalence and indifferency of all actions, and would fain teach us that, if we were true, forsooth, our crimes may be lively stones out of which we shall construct the temple of the true God!6

On my reading this is an amazing passage, and very funny. Emerson IS funny, and a lot of the time. First of all there is the explicit acknowledgement that what he has been saying at least sounds like an extreme form of Pyrrhonic skepticism and relativism. Then the complications begin to emerge. On the one hand, he identifies the implication of Pyrrhonism which is that, if true, there is of all actions “an equivalence and  Emerson, Essays, 403.  Ibid. 6  Ibid., 411. 4 5

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indifferency,” and that would seem to lead us in the direction, if we were honest with ourselves about that truth, of immoralism and crime. Immoralism and crime would become our “true God.” On the other hand, if we prefer immoralism and crime, then all actions are not equivalent and indifferent, and therefore we are not really true Pyrrhonists. What Emerson has just constructed is a peritrope argument showing the emptiness, or rather, the impossibility of true Pyrrhonism for human beings, who naturally do prefer some actions to others, even if immoral and crimes, and so do not act as if all actions are equivalent and indifferent. It is a kind of reductio ad absurdum argument, which is where the humor comes in. It is funny because we do not really expect the argument, and suddenly that aspect dawns for us. He is making a joke! We were not expecting a joke, and yet there it is, with an exclamation point, no less. The next paragraph is even denser and more confusing. After having all but declared Pyrrhonism and relativism, ‘true’ Pyrrhonism, an impossibility for human beings, he seems to reaffirm the ‘truth’ of Pyrrhonism and relativism: I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am gladdened by the predominance of the saccharine principle throughout vegetable nature, and not less by beholding in morals that unrestrained inundation of the principle of good into every chink and hole that selfishness has left open, yea, into selfishness and sin itself; so that no evil is pure, nor hell itself without its extreme satisfactions. But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back.7

This passage is so dense and confusing because from one sentence to the next, from one clause to the next, he seems to say and then unsay what he has just said. He identifies the “predominance of the saccharine principle throughout vegetable nature,” and I will just note that “saccharine” is not an unambiguous word for ‘sweetness,’ with a strong suggestion of ‘too sweet,’ only to then constrain it to chinks and holes left open by what really seems to predominate for Emerson, which is “selfishness.” That would seem to be a bad thing, selfishness, the apparent opposite and 7

 Ibid., 411-12.

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enemy of the saccharine, but selfishness is not quite that either. It turns out that selfishness and sin have their own sweetness, as do evil and hell, which seems to land us once again amidst the immoral and criminal. Then Emerson, I want to say pretends, to clarify his point and reassure us, “lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims,” but then only ‘reminds’ us that he is “only and experimenter” and he says of himself, “I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none profane; I simply experiment, and endless seeker, with no Past at my back.” I am not sure what reassurance we are to take from that. This reassurance perhaps, that when he seems to be making a positive claim, about vegetable nature or about selfishness, or, for that matter, about evil or hell, that he is not. Or rather, maybe he is, but it is a claim he has no intention of sticking to in the future. I will just note that “skeptic” comes from the Greek “zetetic” which means “seeker.” Certainly we know what Emerson thinks of a “foolish consistency” of belief or opinion, but is there a non-foolish consistency? In the next paragraph, the last that I will adduce from “Circles” right now, Emerson does affirm a kind of consistency: Yet this incessant movement and progression which all things partake could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of fixture or stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal generation of circle proceeds, the eternal generator abides.

Suddenly something from the previous paragraph clicks into focus. As much as he seemed to be affirming a universal principle of impurity, relativism, and skepticism, he also affirmed his having his “own head,” obeying his own “whims” and furthermore he elucidates what characterizes his own head and whims, that he is an “experimenter” and an ‘unsettler.’ As much as he seems to change his mind he does not change his mind about changing his mind. In that he abides. Another way to put what Emerson is talking about, what he is doing, is to say that he is talking about thinking, he is thinking, and what thinking is, is dialectical. Peirce’s logical categories of Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness and the subsequent return to Firstness have about them the dialectical character of the Hegelian/Feuerbachian logic of Thesis— Antithesis—Synthesis which then becomes a new Thesis. This is the nature of thinking. There is, therefore, in the continual reversals and revisions, the apparent relativism of Emerson’s writing, a dimension of the performative. He is doing what he is talking about.

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Emerson and the Comic Emerson, I take it, is not generally taken to be a great joker. He may also not be taken to be a dialectical thinker. He is both. Žižek says, vaguely referencing Brecht, “there is no dialectics without humor: the dialectical reversals are deeply connected to comical twists and unexpected shifts of perspective.”8 Emerson is a great joker and his jokes mostly have the form of an understated response to the many comical twists and unexpected shifts of perspective associated with dialectic. Emerson’s own definition of jokes and the comic is: “The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well-intended halfness; a non-performance of what is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, the frustrated expectation, the break of continuity in the intellect, is comedy…..”9 The comic, by this definition, is inherent in thinking itself, since, as T. S. Eliot says in “The Hollow Men,” “Between the idea / And the reality… / Falls the Shadow.”10 A version of this closer to Emerson’s vocabulary would be: between the Intuition and the tuition something is always lost. That is either a tragic or a comic thing. For Emerson, it sometimes appears as tragic, and sometimes as comic. As Emerson says in Nature, “Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece.”11 This claim, in the same paragraph that contains the description of becoming a “transparent eyeball,” suggests that Emerson fully meant that description to be a “comic piece,” anticipating and exceeding in understated humor every bit of fun others have made of that passage. The perspective that triumphs in the end, for Emerson, is the comic. The beautiful is tragic. The sublime is comic. Emerson is a philosopher of sublimity. The beautiful is ultimately tragic because, using Kant’s account of the beautiful from the third Critique, the content of the beautiful, supplied in the third moment of the experience of the beautiful, is “purposiveness without purpose” (Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck).12 The content of the beautiful is to be without content. The beautiful is,  Žižek, Organs without Bodies, 58.  Emerson, Complete Works, 775. 10  T.  S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1963), 81-82. 11  Emerson, Essays, 10. 12  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment translated by J.  H. Bernard (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 68. 8 9

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ultimately, pointless. Existentially, that recognition amounts to a confrontation with our own pointlessness. That creates a sense of the tragic. The sublime is comic, again using Kant, because, although it begins in anxiety and fear, it ends in pleasure. As Kant puts it in the third Critique, The feeling of the sublime is therefore a feeling of pain arising from the want of accordance between the aesthetical estimation of magnitude formed by the imagination and the estimation of the same formed by reason. There is at the same time a pleasure thus excited, arising from the correspondence with rational ideas of this very judgment of the inadequacy of our greatest faculty of sense, in so far as it is law for us to strive after these ideas.13

That is a classic definition of the comic: a situation that starts out bad, but ends well. That is why Dante’s Divine Comedy is a comedy. It starts with Dante lost in a dark wood and then a descent into hell, but ends with a vision of Beatrice and Heaven. The sublime has a similar trajectory. It begins with a sense of anxiety and fear, but ends in joy. Kant’s description of the experience of the sublime could as well be a description of the experience of getting a joke. For Emerson, the bad, the ever-threatening possibility that arouses in him a sense of anxiety and fear, is the possibility of an end to thinking, an end to thought; the possibility that no thought will come. To his delight and amazement, thought always comes. Here is a dialectical thought that humors him, also from Nature: So intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under the undermost garment of nature, and betrays its source in Universal Spirit. For, it pervades Thought also. Every universal truth which we express in words, implies or supposes every other truth. Omne verum vero consonant. It is like a great circle on a sphere, comprising all possible circles; which, however, may be drawn, and comprise it, in like manner. Every such truth is the absolute Ens seen from one side. But it has innumerable sides.14

The “Unity” referred to here is glossed in the paragraph above the paragraph from which the above quotation is taken as “Unity of Nature,— the Unity in Variety,—which meets us everywhere.”15 The dialectic is in  Ibid., §27, 96.  Emerson, Essays, 30. 15  Ibid., 29. 13 14

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Nature itself, which is a Unity in Variety. One wants to say something like, no variety, no unity; and, conversely, no unity, no variety. The Latin is just a gloss on the previous sentence in English. Another translation of “Omne verum vero consonat” is “Every true thing is in harmony with truth.”16 “Ens” is just a philosophical word for ‘Being,’ or the ‘All,’ or, for that matter, for ‘Nature.’ My claim is that this passage contains a joke and that the joke is funny in a way that once you see it it makes you sort of snort in surprise and delight. One bit of humor is in the comical twist and unexpected shift in perspective that occurs at the end of the passage: every truth is an absolute Ens seen from one side, but it has innumerable sides. The first part of that presents a fairly orthodox version of truth as a fixed, universal, absolute, and eternal thing: truth as an “absolute Ens.” The second part, however, completely undoes that idea of truth and presents a version of ‘truth’ that would seem to be the very opposite of truth. A ‘truth’ that has an innumerable number of Ens-s is not a recognizable form of truth at all. It is a ‘truth’ for which there is no, and there can be no end, of searching. In the history of philosophy, the first version correlates with Idealism, also known as Realism (i.e., ideas are real), and the second idea correlates with Nominalism (only individual entities are real, ‘names,’ ideas, are just human heuristics for talking about things). One way to characterize the history of Western philosophy is as an ongoing argument between Realists and Nominalists. Plato was a Realist/Idealist, Aristotle a Nominalist. Modern philosophy—seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy— consisted of arguments between Rationalists (Realists/Idealists) and Empiricists (Nominalists). Emerson, instead of taking a side puts them together, but they can only be put together, as it were, dialectically: like Wittgenstein’s duck/rabbit, you can only think one at a time even as you acknowledge both. The duck/rabbit is itself funny. There is another bit of humor here as well, and this is much more subtle and probably controversial. There is a pervasive sexual undercurrent, I have already called it the ‘erotic,’ in Emerson’s writing that I take to be a crucial part of his esoteric meaning. I get this idea originally from some remarks Cavell makes about Emerson’s essay “Experience,”17 but once 16  Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Annotated Emerson edited by David Mikics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 53. 17  Cavell, Etudes, 128-29. Cavell connects Emerson’s “membering” with “in motion” which “give birth to, experience.”

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one is alerted to this idea, the vague sexual undertones reveal themselves as pervasive presences. In the above quoted passage for example, if we really consider what Emerson is describing he seems to be describing discovering the unity of nature as being like discovering a woman’s vagina. “So intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under the undermost garment of nature, and betrays its source in Universal Spirit.” The “source” “under the undermost garment of nature” recalls for me Ingres’ “The Source” (1856), but more dramatically, Courbet’s “Origin of the World” (1866). This undercurrent of sexual imagery continues throughout the next paragraphs. There is a reference to “organs,” to the forms of male and female, a description of the “fountain-pipes on the unfathomed sea of thought,” which strikes me as fairly ejaculatory. On the one hand, such analogies would be obvious for Emerson. If, first of all, “All things are moral,” as he says in Nature, then no area of nature would be off limits. Second, if wisdom is to be found in the forms and processes of nature, what natural processes are more powerfully indicative of some important ideas than the processes of sex and reproduction? The subtle humor is in saying it and not saying it. For those who would find the analogy between sex and receiving new ideas, the idea of the generation of new ideas, helpful and meaningful, there are plenty of signs of that idea in the words that Emerson uses. Of course, you have to think your way to these ideas. They are implicit and not at all explicit, but there is just enough weirdness in Emerson’s reference to something that is “under the undermost garment of nature” to get a person thinking. For those for whom such a thought is not at all moral, there is no need to think. Nature remains clothed and pudent. I want to say that “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn” is both beautiful and sublime. It is beautiful because it describes the tragedy of the human, our inevitable, inescapable incompleteness. We are erotically incomplete, like Aristophanes’ cut-in-half monsters from Plato’s Symposium, we are socially incomplete in our lives of “quiet desperation,” and we are incomplete in ourselves, we are never completely who we are, we are always striving for some addition to what we have. On the other hand, it is sublime because it describes a condition of endless hope, our endless potential for self-­ transformation, for the development of new ideas, our, to use Peirce’s word again, uberty, which is our ability to draw a new circle. And, from the joyful position of our new circle, our old circle will always look a bit comic.

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Emerson and Beauvoir’s Serious Man “What is the hardest task in the world? To think.”18 —Emerson, “Intellect”

There is a moral dimension to this dialectic of thinking. The moral might be: one ought to think! How can one not think? Well, it takes some effort but it is doable. As I have mentioned, Peirce identifies three modes of turning away from thinking: the method of tenacity (holding onto some belief tenaciously in spite of all counter evidence), the method of authority (letting some authority do your thinking for you, a priest, a parent, a president, the pope), and the method of a priority (this is a more complicated way involving some complicated ratiocination, but, in the end, is not all that different from the way of tenacity). There is, according to Peirce, one way to keep thinking alive and that is the method of science. Simone de Beauvoir, in her book The Ethics of Ambiguity, has a slightly different way of characterizing similar ways of avoiding thinking with a similar method for keeping thinking alive, the difference is that for Beauvoir, the end is not in science but in art. Beauvoir is an Existentialist for whom there is no human essence but only a human condition, and the nature of our condition, as humans, is that it is ambiguous. As Beauvoir says, From the beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity. It was by affirming the irreducible character of ambiguity that Kierkegaard opposed himself to Hegel, and it is by ambiguity that, in our own generation, Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, fundamentally defined man, that being whose being is not to be….19

To be a being whose being is not to be is to be ambiguous. But, as Sartre will argue, people do not want to be ambiguous and so the deny their condition. To deny our condition is to want to BE. What wanting to BE means, for Sartre, is wanting to be God, a being with consciousness (we do not want to be a rock), but that is also complete, whole, without ambiguity. The thing is, however, that we cannot be God and so, for Sartre, human being was basically tragic, man, he says, and I am quoting

 Emerson, Essays, 420.  Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity translated by Bernard Frechtman (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1997), 9-10. 18 19

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Beauvoir here, “is ‘a useless passion.’”20 I take that “passion” to be, somewhat ironically for the atheist Sartre, a reference to the passion of Christ, or Christ’s suffering. Beauvoir, however, disagrees with Sartre about our human condition. She does not see it as a useless passion at all. She sees something for us to do, something actually quite useful, and she calls that something “allowing disclosure.” To “allow disclosure” is to allow the being of other things, other beings, to reveal themselves to you. It is, to use an Emerson word, to be “receptive” to the being, or, to use a Peirce word, the “personality,” of other beings. In the process of this reception, one’s own being, one’s own personality, is inflected, and in this process of reception and inflection is what Beauvoir calls “joy.” In a strikingly Emersonian passage, although without the subcurrent of the comic, Beauvoir describes this joy: I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy.21

This passage strikingly recalls for me Emerson’s stroll across a bare common when he becomes a transparent eyeball. Beauvoir is receiving the landscape, being receptive to the landscape, to the point where she becomes the landscape and in this process of reception she is transformed herself by the landscape and this experience of loss of self, of ecstasy, is an experience of “joy.” An interesting dimension to this joy is the way the “I” is at once, or alternately, the landscape and at a distance from the landscape. That is, the ecstasy is experienced dialectically. There is some kind of reverberation, some kind of divagation, some kind of ambiguation in which she is the landscape and she is herself, back and forth like a duck/rabbit. This experience obviously has a large impact upon her. She is transformed by this experience. What has opened up for her are all sorts of new possibilities for experiences. She has become a new, larger person from this experience. Furthermore, Beauvoir offers instructions for how to have this kind of experience. Again, she quotes Sartre, but to ends that Sartre himself never  Ibid., 10  Ibid., 12.

20 21

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quite realized. “Man, Sartre tells us, is ‘a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being.’”22 This is instruction about how to be ‘receptive.’ It is a dynamic process that might be called dialectical or even conversational. One, as it were, contracts one’s being and when one does contract one’s being, when one makes space for the expression of being of another, the other will express its being. This may sound abstract but it is not. One can walk down the street yelling “It is I” over and over and the cats and the dogs and all of the other people will flee. Or, one can sit still-ly in the woods, like Thoreau. Thoreau says, “You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.”23 There is something slightly counter-intuitive in this. That is, one might think that to most effectively encounter an Other one must first declare who one is, let them know who you are. In fact, however, Beauvoir is suggesting, to encounter an Other most effectively requires actually contracting yourself. An Other will only reveal to you their self if you make a space in which that revelation can happen. I call this the Zimzum. I get this from Harold Bloom’s discussion of the Lurianic Kabbalah. Bloom says of it, “This Zimzum, or holding in of the divine breath and being….”24 In the Kabbalah God is described as being faced with a dilemma. He wants to create, but he finds that he cannot because there is nowhere to put anything. He is everywhere. Then he gets an idea. He contracts himself and thereby makes space for his creation. This self-contraction of God is the Zimzum. This is something that we can do. We can contract ourselves in order that being may be. The best example of this to my mind is in a conversation. Certainly, there are conversations, well, maybe they are not so much conversations, in which one person dominates or even does all of the talking. And then there are the magical conversations which are really mutual and reciprocal ‘turnings’ in which one person contracts their self, making a space for the other to express herself, and then the person who has just expressed herself contracts herself and creates a space in which the person who had just contracted himself can now express himself and he does, and in the process of  Ibid.  Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; Walden, or, Life in the Woods; The Maine Woods; Cape Cod edited by Robert F.  Sayre (New York: Library of America, 1985), Ch. 12, “Brute Neighbors,” 171. 24  Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 72. 22 23

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this alternation of contracting and expressing new circles are being consecutively drawn and each conversationalist is transforming and being transformed by the other. That is Zimzuming. There is a beautiful sculpture by Barnett Newman that is atop the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art that is called Zim Zum. It is a series of two rows of monolithic slabs of bronze at angles to one another. Looked at from one perspective they form a kind of impenetrable wall, but if you change your perspective, move to another place, they, as it were, open up and reveal many ways to move through them. That is the way the Zimzum works. Insofar as one insists on BEING, the world presents an impenetrable wall. One IS a useless passion. But insofar as one contracts one’s being, insofar as one Zimzums, other beings, the world itself, will open up to you and you will be transformed and it will feel like joy. Of course, there are risks involved. The other may reveal a being so enormous that you are consumed by it. Or, the other might reveal a being that is so different, so irreconcilable with your being, that you find yourself lost. Or, the other may reveal a being that is loathsome to you or terrifying to you or overwhelming to you. It takes a considerable amount of self-­ trust, say, self-reliance to really Zimzum the Other or the world. Many do not, or do not go very far in their Zimzuming. Maybe they will be willing, as in self-love, to Zimzum those closest to them, but not the really Other, not the other from another religion or another ethnicity or another gender or another country. That refusal to Zimzum is what Beauvoir calls “seriousness.” Beauvoir identifies six types, six levels, of people and the levels are determined by how willing, how courageous a person is, to Zimzum, which is just another way of saying how willing they are to acknowledge ambiguity, which is just another way of saying, willing to acknowledge counter-evidence to one’s own beliefs and expectations, which is just another way of saying willing to use Peirce’s method of science, which is just another way of saying willing to admit one’s own fallibility, which is just another way to say, to do what Emerson calls to think. According to Beauvoir, at every stage below the artist the reason for the resistance to new evidence, to ambiguity, is fear. We see this fear in the first and lowest human level which Beauvoir calls the “sub-man.” As Beauvoir says, If we were to establish a kind of hierarchy among men, we would put those who are denuded of this living warmth—the tepidity which the Gospel speaks of—on the lowest rung of the ladder. To exist is to make oneself a

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lack of being; it is to cast oneself into the world. Those who occupy themselves in restraining this original movement can be considered sub-men. They have eyes and ears, but from their childhood on they make themselves blind and deaf, without love and without desire. This apathy manifests a fundamental fear in the face of existence, in the face of the risks and tensions which it implies.25

It is important to remember that The Ethics of Ambiguity was published in 1948, and so Beauvoir was working through these ideas during World War II. The sub-men are great followers, great obey-ers of orders. They are, from one perspective, from the perspective of what is possible for human beings, pitiful and pitiable, but from another perspective they are terrifying: Thus, though we have defined him as a denial and flight, the sub-man is not a harmless creature. He realizes himself in the world as a blind uncontrolled force which anybody can get control of. In lynchings, in pogroms, in all the great bloody movements organized by the fanaticism of seriousness and passion, movements where there is no risk, those who do the actual dirty work are recruited from among the sub-men.

The sub-man is precisely Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.” Above the sub-man is the serious man. The serious man does take responsibility for the values that he holds, but all of those values are “ready-made values.” They are the values imposed on people by ideology, by convention, by society. For ‘serious’ people men are men, and women, women, and women are properly wives. The counter-evidence serious people refuse to see, or see and deny, is evidence that people are more complicated than the ready-made values that society would impose upon them. Peoples’ ambitions are more complicated, their sense of their own genders is more complicated, what they want sexually is more complicated, who they want to be is more complicated. To be a serious person is to discount or deny all of the complications that make people interesting in favor of a world of people cast in their assigned roles. This is as constraining to the serious person herself as much as it is about her constraining the possibilities of others. No one wins from seriousness. At this low level it correlates pretty well with Peirce’s idea of the “way of tenacity.” Above the ‘serious person’ Beauvoir places the ‘nihilist.’ The nihilist is one  Beauvoir, Ethics, 42.

25

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who has acknowledged the ambiguity of trying to uphold all of the ready-­ made values. What the nihilist sees is that ALL of the ready-made values occlude ambiguity, complexity, the reality of people’s complexity. They come to the conclusion that there are NO stable values, in fact, no values that are real values at all. It is amusing to me that Beauvoir puts the ‘nihilist’ above what I understand to be a fairly normal, ordinary person which is the serious person. Since most of us mostly live in a world of more or less ready-made values, to the accepter of ready-made values the ‘nihilist’ appears as a kind of monster. But I take Beauvoir’s point that compared to the serious person, the world is considerably more complicated, that is to say, ambiguous, for the nihilist and that, that is moral progress. Above the nihilist is the ‘adventurer.’ The adventurer graduates from nihilism when she realizes that there are real pleasures to affirm, real values to celebrate that can bring joy. Now joy has entered the value system. Trying out new things, having adventures brings joy. The seriousness of the adventurer is the refusal to see the limits of adventures, the shallowness of only valuing adventures. I think of, in this regard, the sexual adventurer who lives for one-night stands or serial short-term romantic adventures. Fun, no doubt, for a time, I would say; of dwindling pleasure return as time wears on. There is some good in adventures, but adventuring too has its ambiguities that must be acknowledged. After and above the ‘adventurer’ comes the ‘passionate’ person. This is the person who, while adventuring, has discovered some one person, or some one cause for which they feel a passionate attachment. A ‘serious’ adventurer will ignore, deny, refuse this call to attachment. An adventurer open to ambiguity, a creative adventurer will heed the call and become a ‘passionate’ person committed with a passion to one thing that is all-­ important to them. It could be another person whom they romantically love, a political cause, a career, a child, anything that becomes more important to them than their adventuring. The final highest level in this ethics of ambiguity Beauvoir gives to the ‘artist.’ The “artist,” as I read Beauvoir, is just the person who refuses all seriousness, who remains open to the emerging, ever-changing signs. It is one who has the courage to be always open to drawing a new circle. Beauvoir’s artist is Emerson’s Man Thinking. It is that openness to ‘drawing a new circle’ that is the creative act of an artist, so that non-serious scientists are ‘artists’ in this sense, as are the non-serious car sales person, or teacher, or computer programmer. The artist employs Peirce’s ‘method of science.’ It is not that the ‘artist’ has no beliefs, like the ‘nihilist.’ They

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have all sorts of beliefs, beliefs that they are passionate about and will argue for and defend. It is just that, with respect to their passionately held beliefs they maintain the attitude of Socrates expressed in Plato’s Gorgias, speaking to Gorgias: For my part, I’d be pleased to continue questioning you if you’re the same kind of man I am, otherwise I would drop it. And what kind of man am I? One of those who would be pleased to be refuted if I say anything untrue, and who would be pleased to refute anyone who says anything untrue; one who, however, wouldn’t be any less pleased to be refuted than to refute. For I count being refuted a greater good, insofar as it is a greater good to be rid of the greatest evil from oneself than to rid someone else of it.26

I take “the greatest evil” that Socrates refers to here to be precisely ‘seriousness’ in Beauvoir’s sense of the refusal to acknowledge ambiguity and to insist that one knows things that one does not know. That is what the Greeks called hybris.

Why Anyone’s Oppression Oppresses Me Beauvoir’s enemy in The Ethics of Ambiguity is oppression. I believe she felt it, as a woman and as a French resistance fighter under the Nazi occupation of France, and she saw it all around her in the world, and saw how pointless it was. It is pointless precisely because, while it may seem in one’s own self-interest to oppress others, to bully and dominate and control others for our own purposes, it is not. She begins her argument for why it is in no one’s self-interest to oppress others, and that, in fact, anyone’s oppression oppresses me, by invoking a claim by Hegel that “‘Each conscious seeks the death of the other.’”27 This would seem to be the ultimate expression of the desirability of the power to oppress. Beauvoir ­acknowledges that this may be an initial impulse, but then explains what is wrong with it. She associates Hegel’s claim with the desire to be, as it were, everything. I take that to be a kind of childish wish for absolute invulnerability. But, as Beauvoir points out, “If I were really everything there would be nothing beside me; the world would be empty. There

 Plato, Gorgias, 458a.  Beauvoir, Ethics, 70.

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would be nothing to possess, and I myself would be nothing.”28 A person should …understand that by taking the world away from me, others also give it to me, since a thing is given to me only the by the movement which snatches it away from me. To will that there be being is also to will that there be men by and for whom the world is endowed with human significations. One can reveal the world only on a basis revealed by other men.29

The conclusion this thought leads Beauvoir to is that …every man needs the freedom of other men and, in a sense, always wants it, even though he may be a tyrant; the only thing he fails to do is to assume honestly the consequences of such a wish. Only the freedom of others keeps each of us from hardening in the absurdity of facticity.30

What my freedom consists of, for Beauvoir, is the power to allow others to disclose themselves to me, so that I can grow, and to have others who allow me to disclose myself to them, so that I can be myself and contribute to the growth of others. Anyone who is oppressed oppresses me because my powers to allow disclosure or to disclose are thereby constrained. Emerson expresses a similar thought. In his first address on “The Fugitive Slave Law” in Concord, on May 3, 1851, he speaks with rage against the law and against Daniel Webster as a defender of the law. He says what are for him some pretty strong things like, “By the sentiment of duty. An immoral law makes it a man’s duty to break it, at every hazard. For virtue is the very self of every man. It is therefore a principle of law that an immoral contract is void, and that an immoral statute is void.”31 Those seem to me to be pretty strong words coming from Emerson, who does not generally like to take strong political positions in public. He gives another lecture on “The Fugitive Slave Law” in New York City on March 7, 1854. In this lecture he seems more weary and just disappointed than outraged. The new mood makes him more philosophical. He begins by saying, “I do not often speak to public questions;—they are odious and hurtful, and it seems like meddling or leaving your work.” He goes on to  Ibid., 71.  Ibid. 30  Ibid. 31  Emerson, Complete Works, 1150. 28 29

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give an account of what his own work is, all of which is in stark contrast to being here giving this public political lecture. Even his moral pronouncements in the course of the lecture strike one as uttered from a place of weariness, half-hearted, “For I suppose that liberty is an accurate index, in men and nations, of general progress.”32 That could have been said with a little more force. Then, “For it is,—is it not?—the essence of courtesy, of politeness, of religion, of love, to prefer another, to postpone oneself, to protect another from oneself.”33 These are strikingly mild words when talking about the legal institution of slavery. But then he seems to rouse himself and to say the thing that needs to be said: A man who steals another man’s labor steals away his own faculties; his integrity, his humanity is flowing away from him. The habit of oppression cuts out the moral eyes, and though the intellect goes on simulating the moral as before, its sanity is gradually destroyed.34

Emerson has returned. Oppression leads to a kind of insanity. No one sane would oppress or support oppression. It is the same thought that Beauvoir will express and for the same reasons, although the vocabulary is slightly different.

Ambiguities of ‘Seriousness’ In the essay “Art” from Essays: First Series Emerson says: No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share. Though he were never so original, never so wilful and fantastic, he cannot wipe out of his work every trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew. The very avoidance betrays the usage he avoids. Above his will, and out of his sight, he is necessitated, by the air he breathes, and the idea on which he and his contemporaries live and toil, to share the manner of the times, without knowing what that manner is.35

 Ibid., 1163.  Ibid. 34  Ibid., 1165. 35  Ibid., 432. 32 33

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This, it seems to me, is an acknowledgement on Emerson’s part, that some degree of ‘seriousness,’ some degree of conformity, some degree of consistency is inevitable and unavoidable. It is, he says in “Self-Reliance,” “a foolish consistency” that “is the hobgoblin of little minds”36 (my emphasis). I take that to mean that there are ways of being consistent that are not foolish. Emerson says a “man” (sic) cannot not “share in the manner of the times, without knowing what that manner is.” Certainly, Emerson uses gendered language in a way that strikes the contemporary reader as quite inappropriate, but just as clearly Emerson has no idea that he is being inappropriate. It is the manner of his times. One thing to say about that is that writing in a way that is appropriate at one time may appear as a form of seriousness, the bad sort of seriousness, at a later time, and Emerson was as susceptible and even guilty of that form of seriousness as anyone. But then again, no doubt, so am I, or will be, and so will everyone be who writes. This happens even for scientists. Eighteenth-century science writers talking about phlogiston will sound silly to us today, but, presumably, no more silly than today’s scientists talking about string theory will sound to scientists in two hundred years, if there are any scientists in two hundred years. And people writing about driving cars and eating things that have lived like plants and animals may sound as morally barbaric as accounts of slave owners sound to us today. I believe that Emerson tries not to sound morally barbaric, as do I, even if he, and I, do not always succeed. But there is also a deeper and more profound issue with regard to ‘seriousness’ that should be addressed and acknowledged. I will, in general, use “serious” and “seriousness” as pejoratives, but it is important to acknowledge that there is a form of being “serious” and of “seriousness” that amount to what Emerson calls “genius.” In “Self-Reliance,” speaking of reading some verses that moved him, Emerson says, “The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, —that is genius.”37 There is what the ­existentialists call “bad faith” which is precisely a form of the bad seriousness. But there is also something like “good faith,” faith in yourself, but even more, I would say for Emerson, faith in Nature, faith that new ideas will come. So, as in everything, “‘the old oracle said ‘All things have two handles: beware  Ibid., 265.  Ibid., 259.

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of the wrong one.’”38 In this case, the “old oracle” is Epictetus in his Enchiridion. So, there is bad seriousness that Beauvoir describes, but there is also a good form of seriousness, which, ironically enough, or perhaps not ironically, Beauvoir also acknowledges. As she says, “…the freedom of other men must be respected and they must be helped to free themselves. Such a law imposes limits upon action and at the same time immediately gives it content. Beyond the rejected seriousness is found a genuine seriousness.”39 George Connell, in an article all about the ambiguities of seriousness, sums up the ambiguities nicely: On the one hand, seriousness carries a host of positive associations. It is honesty vs. imposture, concern vs. indifference, authenticity vs. inauthenticity, commitment vs. meaninglessness. On the other hand, seriousness carries equally strong negative and even ludicrous associations. It is pompous and pedantic, smug and self-content, pretentious and pharisaical, fatuous and finicky. Ironically, in its very humorlessness, the second seriousness is an inexhaustible source of humor.40

There is, then, a dialectic of seriousness, between, as it were, good seriousness and bad seriousness, and inherent in that dialectic is an emergent humor.

Emerson and Frost: Seriousness and Humor; Grievances and Griefs Robert Frost is, for me, an excellent reader of Emerson, in the sense that he is very Emersonian. Frost describes Emerson as “a poetic philosopher” or “philosophical poet.”41 That seems right to me. Emerson’s poetry is philosophical and his philosophy poetical, full of analogies and metaphors.

 Ibid., 55.  Beauvoir, Ethics, 60. 40  George Connell, “The Importance of Being Earnest: Coming to Terms with Judge William’s Seriousness,” International Kierkegaard Commentary: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, [Volume 12] (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997), 116. 41  Robert Frost, Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays (New York: Library of America, 1993), 860. 38 39

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With respect to the question of seriousness, I think Frost gets the ambiguity exactly right: The style is the man. Rather say the style is the way the man takes himself and to be at all charming or even bearable, the way is almost rigidly prescribed. If it is with outer seriousness, it must be with inner humor. If it is with outer humor, it must be with inner seriousness. Neither one alone without the other will do.42

Emerson’s style is outer seriousness with inner humor, just as Mark Twain’s style is outer humor with inner seriousness. It seems to me that many readers of Emerson, and this includes me when I first started reading Emerson, miss the inner humor, they miss the dialectic, they are, in short, ‘serious’ readers of Emerson, in the pejorative sense of ‘serious.’ Another way of expressing this ambiguity of seriousness that Frost identifies is in terms of the distinction between griefs and grievances. As Frost says, “A distinction must be made between griefs and grievances.”43 Frost notes that “Grievances are probably more useful than griefs,” but declares his preference for griefs: “I don’t like grievances…. What I like are griefs.”44 What is the difference? Grievances are a form of ‘seriousness’ (in the bad sense). They are more useful precisely because they are an insistence on what Beauvoir calls “ready-made values.” Ready-made values are what are wanted and expected. Ready-made values, and so grievances, are understandable, comprehensible. Griefs, on the other hand (the other handle!), are incomprehensible. There is no fathoming the griefs. As Frost says, “Grievances are a form of impatience. Griefs a form of patience.”45 Impatience may get you a seat upgrade, with griefs one must simply abide. Grievances pull us apart, griefs bring us together. There is no inner humor to grievances. There is definitely an inner humor to grief. Emerson says of the comic: “If the essence of the Comic be this contrast in the intellect between the idea and the false performance, there is good reason why we should be effected by the exposure.”46 That is his philosophy in a nutshell. It is the unity of the ideal and the plurality of the experience. That is how thinking works, in that dialectic of unity and  Ibid., 746.  Ibid., 742. 44  Ibid., 743. 45  Ibid. 46  Emerson, Complete works, 776 42 43

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diversity. Those are the poles of thought and the poles of nature. “This is the radical joke of life and then of literature. The presence of the ideal of right and of truth in all action makes the yawning delinquencies of practice remorseful to the conscience, tragic to the interest, but droll to the intellect.”47 To repeat by way of emphasis, as Emerson says in Nature, “nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece.” It is not just that things are comic, it is that the comic works through nature and thought: …a perception of the Comic seems to be a balance-wheel in our metaphysical structure. It appears to be an essential element in a fine character. Wherever the intellect is constructive, it will be found. We feel the absence of it as a defect in the noblest and most oracular soul. The perception of the Comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometime lose themselves.48

This “balance-wheel” I would say is the balance-wheel that keeps the dialectic of the tragic and the comic, the beautiful and the sublime, the unity and the diversity in motion. It is natura naturans (nature naturing) in full essayist mode, experimenting in possibilities of one and many, identities and differences. Emerson quotes Plutarch and I believe describes his own approach to writing and lecturing: “it is the top of wisdom to philosophize yet not to appear to do it, and in mirth to do the same with those that are serious and seem in earnest….”49 This earnestness is “the pretension of the parties to some consideration on account of their condition.” Emerson elaborates, The lie is in the surrender of the man to his appearance; as if a man should neglect himself and treat his shadow on the wall with marks of infinite respect. It affects us oddly, as to see things turned upside down, or to see a man in a high wind run after his hat, which is always droll. The relations of the parties is inverted, —hat being for the moment master, the bystanders cheering the hat.50

 Ibid.  Ibid. 49  Ibid., 777. 50  Ibid., 779. 47 48

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The “pretension” is that one deserves, say, respect merely because of one’s position, not for who one is or what one does. This is just another version of seriousness. The assuming of the ready-made value of some social position to be your value, while knowing that, really, you are not that. I will just mention that the scene described by Emerson of the man with the hat is almost exactly recreated by Alfred Hitchcock in his 1940 film Foreign Correspondent, down to the details of one bystander laughing and a second bystander offering betting odds on the hat. It is almost as if Hitchcock, recently arrived in the United States, had read some Emerson to get a sense of his new home. That, or it is just evidence for the truth and universality of Emerson’s analysis of the Comic. There is too much seriousness (in the bad sense) in the unity by itself as there is also in the plurality without the unity. There is a need for a continual inversion, a continual movement between the two, to get the proper sense of things. In a very Emersonian sentence Emerson gets to the heart of seriousness, the ambiguity of seriousness, and the emergence of the comic: “We do nothing that is not laughable whenever we quit our spontaneous sentiment.”51 It is a complicated sentence, with a triple negation that undoes its sense as it makes its sense: “nothing,” “not,” and “quit.” The first double negation of “nothing” and “not” can be translated into an affirmation: everything we do is laughable whenever we quit our spontaneous sentiment. Why does he not just say that? I think one reason is that it would not be as funny. But the kicker comes in the final negation, “whenever we quit our spontaneous sentiment.” What exactly does that mean? What is the translation of that? I take the “our spontaneous sentiment” to be the opposite of our serious sentiment (in the bad sense), the lie of the surrender of the man to his appearance, or, in short, conformity. But the way Emerson puts it is deeply ironic. To stay true to something, to not quit, would seem to be the opposite of being spontaneous, and yet what Emerson seems to be praising is being true to being spontaneous. How does one do that? One must consistently avoid a foolish consistency. One does so by keeping the balance-wheel in motion. That is the dialectic of thinking, a movement between the tragic and the comic that takes very seriously avoiding seriousness.  Ibid., 780.

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Emerson ends his essay on the Comic with a tragic joke: When Carlini was convulsing Naples with laughter, a patient waited on a physician in that city, to obtain some remedy for excessive melancholy, which was rapidly consuming his life. The physician endeavored to cheer his spirits, and advised him to go to the theatre, and see Carlini. He replied, “I am Carlini.”52

It is a very sad joke, and very funny.

 Ibid.

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CHAPTER 4

Philosophy of the People

“Where was a wall is now a door.” —Emerson in his Journal, 1866.

When Dewey describes Emerson as the philosopher of democracy I take it that it is because of Emerson’s not just championing the individual person, but also always addressing the individual person. I always feel, reading an Emerson essay, that he is speaking directly to me, speaking for me. All other political systems that I am aware of privilege a group: Aristocracy, the group of the best, oligarchy, the group of the landed, plutocracy, the group of the wealthy, even communism is based on the idea of a group, the politburo, making the decisions for everyone else. Only democracy puts its trust in the collective voice of individual people. Emerson himself was wary to the point of suspicion of all groups. Many tried to get him to join their group: the Abolitionists, the Transcendentalists, Brook Farm, but in every case Emerson, much to peoples’ frustration and exasperation, demurred. I agree with Dewey, that if Emerson was committed to anything group-like, it was to the group-like project of democracy, and only because democracy, as a political system, essentially privileged the voice of the private person. As Dewey says, quite eloquently, in my opinion: “Against creed and system, convention and institution, Emerson stands for restoring to the common man that which in the name of religion, of philosophy, of art and morality, has been embezzled from the common

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store and appropriated to sectarian and class use.”1 What Dewey says of Emerson I believe Emerson aspired to himself. It is recorded in his journal from 1866 that Emerson presented a series of lectures in Boston entitled “Philosophy of the People.” He presented the series of six lectures in Chickering Hall in Boston, a huge auditorium with balconies and hundreds of seats. He presented the lectures in April of 1866, less than a year after the end of the Civil War in April of 1865 and almost exactly a year after the death of Abraham Lincoln on April 15, 1865. The titles of the six lectures were: I.  Seven Metres of Intellect; II. Instinct, Perception, Talent; III. Genius, Imagination, Taste; IV, Laws of Mind; V.  Conduct of Intellect; VI.  Relation of Intellect to Morals. What I find striking in these six lecture titles is that there is no reference to the war or the recent traumatic events. It is as if there had not been any war. Emerson had other things to talk about. And yet, I want to argue, Emerson’s lectures were very much of the people and for the people. He was giving the people precisely what they needed. They were of the people because they were, as the best philosophy always is, a kind of articulation of the deepest unarticulated thoughts that the people, as it were, did not know they had, but they did have. They were for the people because they described a way of being, a way of thinking that showed a way forward out of their trauma. Although he does not seem to have mentioned the war in his lectures at that time, he does ruminate on the war in his journal: It is plain that the War has made many things public that were once quite too private. A man searches his mind for thoughts, and finds only the old common places; but, at some moment, on the old topic of the days, politics, he makes a distinction he had not made; he discerns a little inlet not seen before. Where there was a wall is now a door.2

This is a beautiful description of how philosophy, ideally, can work. When it works it works in a “moment.” A distinction is made that had not been made before, or not recognized before. A new possibility opens up to the mind, where there was a wall, now a door. This is what is needed. This is what is always needed, to find the door where it looks like only a 1  John Dewey, “Emerson—The Philosopher of Democracy” in the International Journal of Ethics, July, 1903, 411. 2  Emerson, Journals, vol. 10, p. 144.

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wall. This is an experience, in my reading of Emerson, that Emerson frequently had, and a type of experience for which he lived. Every essay that Emerson wrote, every lecture that he gave, can be understood as a recounting of such an experience. The way to such an experience is what Emerson has to offer us. Every essay Emerson wrote presents us with the possibility of just this type of experience. His essays are filled with apparent walls and secret doors. The war does not make this experience happen. The war just revealed publicly things people kept private. I assume that what Emerson has in mind for what was revealed were things like pervasive racism and antipathies between his compatriot Americans. The philosophical “moment,” the moment of a dawning of a new idea, a new distinction, a new possibility, that happens in some other way, prompted, perhaps, by the revelations created by the war, but actually realized in an individual person for herself or himself. How such a moment happens is what I find to be the subject of all of Emerson’s writings, along with some of the things that get revealed, some of the doors that are opened, in such moments. Just to linger for a moment on the idea that the war revealed things publicly that people had kept “too private.” I will now make a swerve from the apparent sublimity of the Civil War to the apparent ridiculousness of an interpretation of something said by the then Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld in the prelude to the U.  S. invasion of Iraq by the Slovenian philosopher and provocateur Slavoj Žižek. I do this here to exemplify one of my strategies which is to pair profound things said by Emerson with unlikely, implausible, and, I hope, surprisingly similar things said by very different thinkers. This move I take to be itself a kind of genre defying, metanarrative breaking, combining of high and low, disrespecting traditional categories that is characteristic of the postmodern in general. This is what Žižek says: In March 2003, Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown. “There are known knowns. These are the things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know that we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know that we don’t know.” What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” the things we don’t know that we

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know—which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say.3

I will just note the little joke of “what he forgot to say,” which of course Rumsfeld did not forget to say, had no idea of saying, and could not have said what Žižek will say he forgot to say. I read Emerson’s “what the war has made public” as identifying precisely what Žižek calls an “unknown known.” The racisms and antipathies were the unknown knowns that, in some sense, prompted the American Civil War, were worked through during the Civil War, and had still to be dealt with after the Civil War. And, as George Carlin has joked, the Civil War was decidedly not civil. There is something deep here with respect to my understanding of how to interpret Emerson’s writings, as well as to understanding the nature of philosophy in general. Emerson, generally speaking, was not a big fan of Hegel, but he does quote Hegel (or maybe it is a gloss on an idea he found in Hegel or in a book on Hegel), and I think he quotes the passage because he approves of the idea: “Hegel’s definition of liberty was, the spirit’s realization of itself.”4 Emerson consistently describes himself as an ‘idealist,’ but I do not read him as a metaphysical idealist, like Plato (may have been, you never really know with Plato), but as endorsing a kind of naturalized idealism. His naturalized idealism, and I will talk about this at length, especially in relation to Charles Sanders Peirce, has to do with the idea that the possibility of something in nature precedes the actuality of that thing in nature and that possibility Emerson will refer to as an “idea.” The big philosophical question is: where do ideas come from? Plato had a theory. Aristotle had a theory. Descartes had a theory. Locke and Hume had a theory. Kant had a theory. Emerson, I believe, has, if somewhat vague, a theory. I will argue that what is vague in Emerson is made considerably more precise by Peirce, although not completely precise. In any event, one way to describe emergent ideas, the “distinction” that is suddenly made, the “door” that suddenly opens is as an unknown known. The source of these unknown knowns, these ideas, can be usefully described as the ‘unconscious.’ Beautiful things can and do come from the unconscious, but the unconscious is also where is stored many ugly things. That is especially the unconscious of Freud. The unconscious, for Freud, is the realm of the 3 4

 Slavoj Žižek In These Times, May 21, 2004. https://www.lacan.com/zizekrumsfeld.htm  Emerson, Journals, vol. 10. P. 144.

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repressed. What Emerson describes as things “too private” could as accurately be described as repressed material. Freud’s own theory was that beautiful things, things of extraordinary benefit to society can come from repressed material “sublimated,” that is, repressed desires, repressed sexual desires or repressed desires for violence, can be redirected in positive and socially useful ways. The infantile swordsman becomes a surgeon. Freud’s “talking cure” is all about making unconscious material, repressed material, conscious. Freud’s famous phrase, beloved by Žižek, is “wo es war soll ich warden” meaning literally, ‘where it was, there shall I be,’ and meaning more figuratively, what was in the unconscious will become for me conscious. In other words, the goal was to own one’s own repressed material. The goal was freedom. Repressed material forces behaviors that a person has no control over. Get control over your repressed material, get control over your behavior. The point of this in relation to Emerson is that, on my reading of Emerson, and I am prompted to this reading by an interpretation of part of Emerson’s essay “Experience” by Stanley Cavell, it is part of Emerson’s process of thinking, part of his way to the discovery of doors in what appear to be walls, is by diving into his own unconscious, confronting the unpleasant unknown knowns that most people prefer to keep unknown. Other names for the unconscious that Emerson uses are “nature” and “instinct.” What this means for interpreting Emerson is that there is in many of Emerson’s essays a dimension of what Žižek calls the “ambiguous obscene.”5 The “ambiguous obscene” refers to, say, a passage that can be read as either clean, decent, ordinary talk OR as indecent and obscene. A double entendre is an example of an “ambiguous obscene.” Cavell identifies in Emerson’s “imp” words something like this idea of an ambiguous obscene, especially in Emerson’s use of the word “impudent” which is in fact based on “pudenda,” genitals, especially a woman’s genitals, so that “impudence” is, etymologically, a looking at things that should not be looked at. Cavell reads Emerson as meaning the full etymological 5  Slavoj Žižek explains the ‘ambiguous obscene’ in “Shostakovich in Casablanca” at https://www.lacan.com/zizcasablanca.htm. In the movie Casablanca there is a 3½-second ellipsis in which the characters of Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) may have had sex or may not have had sex. As Žižek puts it, “the film is not simply ambiguous; it rather generates two very clear, although mutually exclusive meanings—they did it, and they didn’t do it…” So, I suppose it is ambiguous and not ambiguous.

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significance when he uses the word “impudent,”6 although always Emerson leaves open the possibility of a totally benign, non-obscene interpretation in which “impudent” only means the more commonly understood meaning of something a bit improper. Emerson famously looked at things that are not supposed to be looked at. He records in his journal opening the caskets of both his dead wife Ellen and his dead son Waldo.7 He was not afraid to see. Of course, what is in the Freudian unconscious is obscene. That is why it is in the unconscious. It is in the unconscious because it is something that we do not want to see. And just to be clear, I understand the unconscious to be not, as it were, a place, but a metaphor, and precisely a metaphor for what I will be arguing are for Emerson “ideas.” That is, the content of the unconscious are potentialities for our understanding of ourselves and of things around us in society and in nature. Some of these potentialities are realities that we do not want to acknowledge, things that are for us “too private” or obscene. Such things are in Emerson’s essays, not overtly, but covertly. His goal is to liberate by provoking. As he says in “Circles”: “I unsettle all things.”8

 Cavell, Etudes, “Being Odd, Getting Even (Descartes, Emerson, Poe),” 103-04.  Robert Richardson, Emerson, 3. 8  Emerson, Essays, 412. 6 7

PART II

Postmodern Emerson

CHAPTER 5

Postmodern Emerson

“Postmodern” is a contentious and problematic term. It is even more contentious and problematic to apply the term to Emerson. If postmodern is understood as identifying a specific period, a period after modernism, and that period beginning sometime in the mid-1970s-, then Emerson cannot be postmodern. My own touchstones for understanding the postmodern are Jean-François Lyotard, Cornell West, and Richard Rorty. Richard Rorty, whom almost everyone takes to be the epitome of the postmodern, did not like the term, did not want the term to be applied to him, and called the term itself “meaningless.”1 Still, I find his analysis of the concept of the postmodern quite helpful. Rorty begins and ends his book Philosophy and Social Hope with essays that address, in one way or another, postmodernism. As he says, “Because I keep finding myself referred to as a ‘postmodernist relativist’, I have begun this volume with an essay called “Relativism: Finding and Making” and ended it with an Afterword called “Pragmatism, Pluralism and Postmodernism’.”2 I will say some things about that first essay in relation to Emerson and relativism, and the latter essay title gives a good sense of what terms Rorty prefers: “pragmatism” and “pluralism.” He has no use 1  Richard Rorty, “Afterword: Pragmatism, Pluralism and Postmodernism” in Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 276. 2  Ibid., xiv.

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for “postmodern,” although he does not seem to me to particularly ­disagree with postmodernism philosophically, as he says, “the ‘postmoderns’ are philosophically right,” but then adds, “though politically silly.” I am not exactly sure why “politically silly” except that the people who Rorty seems to associate with the postmoderns do not generally have the same appreciation for American bourgeois liberalism that Rorty does. I could have said “Pragmatic Emerson” or “Pluralist Emerson,” but I have reasons why I would prefer “Postmodern Emerson.” One reason is that I would lose the close ties with both Lyotard and West that describing Emerson as postmodern gets me, ties I very much want to keep. I am also sensitive to Cavell’s desire to dissociate Emerson from pragmatism, an association in which Emerson tends suffer. Emerson, when viewed with the lens of pragmatism, compared to the three great pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, looks like a weak pragmatist. I, however, see Emerson as being in many ways much stronger than any of the major pragmatists and so to measure him against them is measuring, as it were, in the wrong direction. Finally, I think Emerson is a pluralist, but I find that, that description does not say enough for me. Postmodernism is a reaction, politically, aesthetically, and morally, against modernism. I understand neither modernism nor postmodernism as designating a temporal period, but rather a mental attitude. For me, Socrates was postmodern to Plato’s and Aristotle’s versions of what I think of as the modern. I associate the modern with a kind of institutional understanding of the sacred and a hierarchical idea about who has access to Truth. I associate the postmodern with the impulse to invert those hierarchies. That seems a little more than pluralism to me. Žižek provides a gloss on modernism versus postmodernism that comes pretty close to the way I am thinking about it: Perhaps this marks the shift from late Romanticism to modernism: late Romanticism still thought that one must tell the big story of global decline in terms of larger-than-life heroic narrative, while modernism asserted the metaphysical potential of the most common and vulgar bits of our daily experience—and perhaps, postmodernism inverts modernism: one returns to big mythical themes, but they are deprived of their cosmic resonance and treated like common fragments to be manipulated; in short, in modernism we have fragments of common daily life expressing global metaphysical

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vision, while in postmodernism we have larger-than-life figures treated as fragments of common life.3

I find this description pretty helpful. Žižek, however, is still talking about romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism as historical eras whereas I want to treat them as attitudinal stances that anyone could adopt anytime. Again, for me, the best example of what I mean by postmodernism, after Emerson, is Socrates. Big mythical themes deprived of their cosmic resonance and treated like common fragments, larger-than-life figures treated as fragments of common life, strike me as exactly Socrates’ project, talking about cosmic virtues in relation to horse training and shoe making, talking with the most famous people in Greece—Protagoras, Gorgias, Alcibiades, Parmenides—and showing them to be limited, partial fragments of their heroic mythos. It is what Emerson is doing when, in “The American Scholar,” he asks then answers: “What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye….”4 The earliest association of Emerson with postmodernism that I know of is by Cornell West in his The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (1989). West does not directly say, “Emerson is a postmodernist,” but he does describe the time of his writing as “our postmodern moment” and American pragmatism as a useful response to it. As he says, “The distinctive appeal of American pragmatism in our postmodern moment is its unashamedly moral emphasis and its unequivocally ameliorative impulse. In this world-weary period of cynicisms, nihilisms, terrorisms, and possible extermination, there is a longing for norms and values that can make a difference….”5 What must be added to this is that West finds the origins of American pragmatism in the writings of Emerson: “The fundamental argument of this book is that the evasion of epistemology-­centered philosophy—from Emerson to Rorty—results in a conception of philosophy as a form of cultural criticism….”6 West describes Emerson as a cultural critic who “devised and deployed a vast array of 3  Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Misuse) of a Notion (New York: Verso, 2001), 28-9. 4  Emerson, Essays, 69. 5  Cornell West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: The University of Wisconsin, 1989), 4. 6  Ibid, 5.

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rhetorical strategies in order to exert intellectual and moral leadership over a significant segment of the educated classes of his day.” Furthermore, West says, “We can no longer afford or justify confining Emerson to the American terrain. He belongs to that highbrow cast of North Atlantic cultural critics who set the agenda and terms for understanding the modern world.”7 I take West here to be referring, in his reference to “that highbrow cast of North Atlantic cultural critics,” to the great hermeneuts of suspicion identified by Paul Ricoeur: Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud8 (West directly identifies Nietzsche and Marx, but leaves out Freud). I understand these great hermeneuts of suspicion to be largely responsible for, along with economic, technological, and political developments, the emergence of postmodernism. There have been many things written about postmodernism, but for my purposes Jean François Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism in his The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge works quite well: “I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”9 Lyotard, in the very next sentence, makes a very important point vis à vis the remark I make above that it is the hermeneuts of suspicion as well as economic, technological, and political developments that gave rise to postmodernism: “This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it.”10 This is another paradox about origins and consequences. I take this to be a statement that ideas matter, that ideas are the source of other ideas. Postmodernism brings with it some real progress with respect to many issues of justice. Postmodernism has not eliminated sexism and racism and nationalism and classism and the various phobias of Others, but it has made some headway on all these fronts and made it at least socially awkward and largely unappealing to openly avow the traditional Western viewpoints, owned by the hegemonic, dominate class (white men), in all of these areas. It has done this, in part, by problematizing our insider/ outsider group identities. The downside of postmodernism is the way it problematizes our insider/outsider group identities. Our individual identities are constructed out of our group identifications. If our group  Ibid., 11.  Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 32. 9  Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiv. 10  Ibid. 7 8

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identifications get problematized, our individual identities become destabilized. The one identity we are politically and socially allowed without, or with less, censure is our identity as consumers. We become what we buy. Shopping has become less about acquiring necessities to live, than about constructing an image of ourselves. The question, then, is, is this a desirable, a workable, a sustainable source for identity. Postmodernism, postmodern theory, with its strong roots in Marxist theory, will say that it is not. This, too, is in Emerson. Emerson, however, has some non-Marxist strategies for repairing our damaged sense of our self and for founding a new sense of self. One of the primary themes of all of Emerson’s writings is the idea of developing an authentic, individual self. The ultimate foundation for the self for Emerson is not social or societal, which, for us, is late-stage capitalism, but Nature. Emerson is a philosopher of nature. His basic strategy is that if we can figure out how nature works we can understand how we should work in nature. This is a paradoxical concern since we are born into this world and are, each of us, a part of nature, we each have our own natures, so what is there to study or to understand? And yet, we feel ourselves incomplete. We feel the absence of some satisfaction that seems to us promised yet unrealized. Emerson, as a philosopher of nature, is a philosopher of that promise and how it might be realized. Capitalism offers itself as the promise and as the possibility of its realization, but has failed to deliver on that promise. Emerson does not critique capitalism, per se, as Marx does. What Emerson critiques is the idea that capitalism is the promise, or the possibility of its realization. Emerson critiques the idea that capitalism will provide us with the materials we need for constructing an authentic self. Our postmodern dilemma is that we feel lost, we do not know who we are, the old metanarratives that told us who we are have more or less collapsed and we find nothing to replace them to tell us who we are. How are we to find a way to know who we are, who we can be, how we can go forward? In the essay Nature Emerson says, “Every man’s [sic] condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put.”11 Emerson suggests that this problem is not as new as it may seem. Identity, to understand who one is, has always been a problem for people. Metanarratives or no metanarratives, each person’s uniqueness poses the question of who one is to be that no metanarrative can really answer. What Emerson sees is 11  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson: Essays and Lectures, edited by Joel Porte (New York: The Library of America, 1983), 7.

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that the solution to this problem is contained in the very terms that pose the problem. The problem arises from our “condition.” Our condition is comprised of who we are, by nature, and where we find ourselves, in nature. Our lost-ness to ourselves can be described in terms of a sense of disharmony between who we feel we are, by nature, and the nature, the condition, we find ourselves in. It is an ancient Stoic principle that the way to happiness is to find, to recover, the harmony between our inner nature and outer nature. Here is a beautiful quotation from Emerson’s Nature that describes the problem and the solution: The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look to nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opake. The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. Love is as much its demand, as perception.12

It is a beautiful formulation of postmodern existential despair, that “the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps.” The diagnosis is also very postmodern: “man is disunited with himself.” The solution is at once explicit and hieroglyphic: satisfy “the demands of the spirit,” and, furthermore, for the spirit, “love is as much its demand as perception.” Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations is dealing with similar postmodern problems. He is arguing for a philosophy without essences, which is a postmodern philosophy. He sees a similar problem of feeling lost and without reference points to guide us. His language in describing what is needed echoes Emerson’s version. Wittgenstein says, “One might say: the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need.”13 Wittgenstein does not say what the fixed point of our real need is, but I take it is a part of our condition in hieroglyphic. Emerson did not appear to be particularly postmodern when he was writing his essays and giving his lectures, but, retrospectively, reading him through a postmodern lens, he appears radically postmodern, more postmodern than many postmodernists. Emerson, in his way, competes with  Emerson, Essays, 47.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.  E. M.  Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), §108. 12 13

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the great hermeneuts of suspicion Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the classic sources of postmodernism. Emerson is, in some ways, as critical of capitalism as Marx (West describes Marx as Emerson’s “contemporary (and major twentieth-century competitor)”14), as religiously heretical as Nietzsche, and has a pervasive subtext that is as sexual as Freud. For all that, Emerson is not doing a hermeneutics of suspicion. He is doing a hermeneutics of joy. Emerson wears a guise of nineteenth-century decorum and Victorian moral sobriety, but what he is really engaged in is ecstasy, what the postmoderns call jouissance. Further, he claims his right to it, without apology or guilt. He claims this right not just for himself but for everyone. It is the joy of being alive, of being human, of having a mind, of bearing witness to the world for whatever brief time, for a moment, for a life. Against this joy Oedipal urges, class struggle, religious conformity or non-conformity pale. They are not irrelevant, and Emerson will energetically address these issues, but in moments of ecstasy, these issues, and their attendant outrage, confusion, complaint, slip from consciousness. They are outshined by what is experientially possible, by what one actually experiences in such moments of joy. For Emerson, there are complaints that serve justice, but the real gift to another is not simply justice, though that must be declared, but joy. One does not give this gift as an object. It is already in all of us as a potential in every moment. We have it by nature. One gives it by making space for another to experience his or her own joy. The space that Emerson gives he calls an “essay.” In an essay, he models how joy works. It emerges from his thinking, which is nature working in him. When he is thinking, as he says in “Experience,” “All I know is reception.”15 He is receiving and passing on what he receives, like the objects in a gift economy as opposed to capital in capitalism. And the form his passing his gift on takes is as provocation. He provokes via obscurity. Cavell refers to the eminent critic F. O. Matthiessen and Emerson biographer Gay Wilson Allen describing “Emerson’s prose as a mist or a fog.”16 There is something elusive and nebulous to Emerson’s writing. As William James says of Emerson in his “Address at the Emerson Centenary in Concord,” “…this is Emerson’s revelation: The point of any pen can be an epitome of reality….” What I  West, American Evasion, 10.  Emerson, Essays, 491. 16  Cavell, Etudes, 111. 14 15

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understand James to be saying is that Emerson’s essays are performative. He is not writing about nature, he is enacting nature through his pen. In the process of his performing thinking he invites us to think along with him. Performative writing is very postmodern and one of the “vast array of rhetorical strategies” to which West refers. Emerson is criticized for not being more politically active, for not being more demonstrative, for example, in his opposition to the institution of slavery. It is a serious criticism, yet from Emerson we will not get a Stalin or a Chairman Mao, we will not get dogmatic atheists and proliferating phallic symbols. What we get are pathways to joy that anyone can follow if they only learn how to follow the signs that Emerson leaves to mark the way. Sometimes it is time for political activism, to make changes in the world, and sometimes it is time to think, to reflect, to receive and change oneself rather than to work at changing other people. That seems to be the message of perhaps the greatest book on politics every written, Plato’s Republic, where in Book IV Socrates defines justice in just these terms, “justice is doing one’s own work and not meddling with what isn’t one’s own.”17 Knowing the difference is the hard part. Emerson’s sense of justice seems to be pretty close to Plato’s, and he knows the difference between his own and others better than most. I read Emerson’s philosophy as being essentially Nietzschean, or rather, Nietzsche’s philosophy as essentially Emersonian, but Nietzsche has a nice formulation for what is doing. In the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche describes people in general as “honey gatherers of the spirit” and that the one thing we all want is to “bring something home.”18 The philosopher is the one who ventures out into the world of ideas to bring home the ideas that his or her community needs most. Communities are inherently conservative, but in a changing world they also need to change. The philosophers, as it were, leave the community to think the ideas that are not permitted to be thought within the community in order to bring back to the community the ideas that the community needs to make the changes that will allow it to continue in a relatively healthy way. Often the community does not (think) it wants these ideas, but it does. Socrates is the most famous example of bringing ideas to his community that his community was not quite ready to accept, but needed. Emerson was very  Plato, Republic, 433a.  Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 15. 17 18

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­ opular as a speaker and a writer, but, on my reading, only because his p more radical ideas were hidden, as it were, “between the lines,” as a fairly recent book on esoteric writing puts it.19 I see my work as making explicit what is implicit. As I read Emerson, all of his essays are as potentially disruptive as his “Divinity School Address” was to its audience at the Harvard Divinity School.

Emerson and Rorty: A Reading of Postmodern Philosophy Harold Bloom calls Richard Rorty one of the “Emersonians,”20 a judgment with which I agree, and with which, to some extent, so does Richard Rorty. I find Rorty to be an excellent reader of Emerson, although I make that assessment based on just occasional comments here and there in Rorty’s work. One such comment appears in his essay “Pragmatism and romanticism.” Rorty quotes a passage from Emerson’s essay “Circles” that begins, “The life of man is an ever-expanding circle…” and includes the line “There is no outside, no enclosing wall, no circumference to us.” The emphasizing italics are Rorty’s. This is Rorty’s comment on this passage: The most important claim Emerson makes in this essay is that there is no enclosing wall called “the Real.” There is nothing outside language to which language attempts to become adequate. Every human achievement is simply a launching pad for a greater achievement. We shall never find descriptions so perfect that imaginative redescription will become pointless.21

Rorty’s interpretation of Emerson’s “no enclosing wall” as a denial by Emerson of “the Real” is the essence of Rorty’s pluralism, and what I am calling Emerson’s fallibilism or postmodernism. My one critique of Rorty’s interpretation is that, to my mind, Rorty puts too much emphasis on language. I would prefer a more semiotic reading, something like “nothing outside the signs,” since there are certainly meanings and symbols outside of language, not just in artworks, like paintings, but in nature itself, to which Emerson was particularly sensitive. 19  Arthur M.  Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 20  Harold Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (New York: Penguin, 2004), 190. 21  Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 109.

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This does, however, raise a problem for some, namely the problem of relativism. If there is nothing to connect with outside of language, outside of the signs, nothing that serves as a kind of rigid designator to serve as an anchor for meaning, then there would seem to be no meanings that were final, which would seem to amount to saying, there is no meaning at all. Rorty addresses this problem in his essay “Relativism: Finding and Making,” and he addresses it in a way that I think works for Emerson and is consistent with Emerson’s own position. Rorty frames the tension in terms of “making” and “finding.” Rorty associates the narrative of “finding” with traditional philosophical narratives based on the appearance versus reality distinction. There is how things appear to us and then there is how things really are, it is the job of philosophers and truth seekers to “find” out the truth. Rorty, on the other hand, takes the side of what he calls “making.” As Rorty puts it, “many things which common sense thinks are found or discovered are really made or invented.”22 “Common sense” is, generally, a pejorative term in Rorty’s vocabulary, and aligns with what Emerson calls “conformity,” or the opposite of Emerson’s notion of “self-reliance” or thinking. This distinction between ‘found’ and ‘made’ is central to virtually all of Rorty’s writings. “The distinction between the found and the made is a version of that between the absolute and the relative, between something which is what it is apart from its relations to other things, and something whose nature depends upon those relations.”23 This is part of Rorty’s neo-­ pragmatic project to lead us away from metaphysics, away from the Enlightenment idea that science discovers the ‘truth’ about the world, and to empower us to see that things are for us the way we describe them, and so progress, social, political, and moral, will depend on redescriptions. Rorty says, “We [his fellow neo-pragmatists, in Rorty’s use here, a hope, perhaps, more than a description or ascription] hope to replace the reality—appearance distinction with the distinction between the more useful and the less useful.”24 As Rorty says, in another essay, “On our view, all anybody does with anything is use it.”25 These ideas go strongly against the traditional understanding of what philosophy has been taken to be throughout most of the history of  Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), xvii.  Ibid., xviii 24  Ibid., xvii. 25  Ibid., 136. 22 23

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­ hilosophy. Throughout most of the history of philosophy, and central to p Plato’s work (at least, as philosophers have been wont to read Plato for two millennia), philosophy is all about the reality—appearance distinction. The basic narrative is that the hoi polloi are seduced by appearances, while philosophers seek the truth about the world, and when it is found, they will lead a few very special people out of the cave of ignorance, the cave of appearances, into the bright light of Truth. As science, as a method of inquiry, became more and more powerful, especially and increasingly so since about the seventeenth century, it began to displace philosophy because science actually made ‘discoveries,’ found out things, about the world to philosophy’s more general speculations about the world. How can Rorty dispute that? What is Rorty disputing? As it turns out, Rorty’s concerns are quite, as he says himself, “existential,”26 and moral. They are existential in the sense that he sees the whole quest for the truth behind appearances as based on an emotional response to our own sense of our vulnerability in the world. Rorty invokes Derrida’s description of “‘the metaphysics of presence’—the search for a ‘full presence beyond the reach of play,’ an absolute beyond the reach of relationality”27 as being behind much of philosophy throughout the centuries. This ‘metaphysics of presence’ employs the language of a search for truth, but, from Rorty’s perspective, that is just one more form of a denial of the universal contingency amidst which we find ourselves. For Rorty, the world is out there, in all of its contingency, but truth is not out there. “To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.”28 Still, we like to use truth language, yet Rorty is saying that we should not. Here is what he says, …our purposes would be served best by ceasing to see truth as a deep matter, a topic of philosophical interest, or “true” as a term which repays “analysis.” “The nature of truth” is an unprofitable topic, resembling in this respect “the nature of man” and “the nature of God,” and differing from “the nature of the positron,” and “the nature of Oedipal fixation.” But this

 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 361.  Rorty, Social Hope, xiii. 28  Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge, 1989), 5. 26 27

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claim about relative profitability, in turn, is just the recommendation that we in fact say little about these topics, and see how we get on.29

He is saying that truth-talk is unprofitable, but it is not completely clear why. The traditional philosophical hero has always been the uncompromising truth seeker. Rorty proposes an alternative conception of the philosophical hero: the “liberal ironist.” I borrow my definition of “liberal” from Judith Shklar, who says that liberals are the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do. I use “ironist” to name the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires—someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance. Liberal ironists are people who include among these ungroundable desires their own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease.30

Now things begin to fit into place. Truth-talk, which he describes as “an empty compliment—one traditionally paid to writers whose novel jargon we have found useful,”31 is bad because it causes suffering. It humiliates. It oppresses. The only thing saying “this is the truth” adds to saying something simplicitur is that it implies that if you disagree with what I have said there is something wrong with you. Those things that we tend to assume have “intrinsic natures” are those ideas that are most powerful for humiliating other people, so ‘God,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘man,’ for example, we will tend to assume to have intrinsic natures. Truth, then, in Rorty’s reading of it is more like a club to beat people up with than it is really a useful tool for helping us to bear reality. Of course, this is true only if you are a liberal ironist. If you do not mind humiliating people, if other peoples’ suffering is of little account to you, but your own comfort is of primary importance, and you are starting off in a fairly privileged position, then truth-talk might be just the thing you will want to employ. Philosophy, following the ideal of the liberal ironist, will have a very different goal now. The goal will no longer be ‘truth,’ which, according to Rorty was always a self-indulgent, self-deceptive, self-aggrandizing ­project,  Ibid., 8.  Ibid., xv. 31  Ibid., 8. 29 30

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but what Rorty calls “redescription”: finding new ways of describing what is important, with the goals of maximizing, for the community as a whole, freedom, and minimizing suffering. Rorty agreeing with Dewey says, “the function of philosophy is to mediate between old ways of speaking, developed to accomplish earlier tasks, with new ways of speaking, developed in response to new demands.”32 Generalizing from Thomas Kuhn’s idea of “normal science,” from Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Rorty suggests that there is “normal discourse” and “abnormal discourse.”33 Normal discourses are all of the ordinary language games, vocabularies, that we use every day to get done the things we need to get done. Common sense is the normative guide to normal discourse. Abnormal discourse marks the attempts at redescription, at developing new ways of describing the world that will serve the twin purposes of augmenting freedom and minimizing suffering. In science, as Kuhn has plotted the development of a new scientific theory, which will begin as a marginalized and “crazy” idea, but, if ‘useful,’ will gradually accrue adherents, until it becomes the norm and the old way of talking now looks crazy, as does the next new theory coming down the line. Similarly in moral language, the idea that gay and lesbian people should be able to marry people of their own sex was almost unthinkable, then it began to be not only thinkable but sayable, and now it is doable. The people who radically oppose gay marriage today are beginning to sound like weirdos, just as some of the people on the cutting edge of the gender wars are still considered to be strange. And these strategies are really about just a new way of talking about drawing a new circle. Philosophy, under this model, is all about abnormal discourse. It is about talking about things, from science to morality, in ways that seem from slightly to very crazy to most people enmeshed in normal discourse. It is about going against ‘common sense’ with respect to principles of justice, truth, and right. This is undertaken because the normal discourses of justice, truth, and right have been revealed to hide various forms of oppression and cruelty. All of this is in Emerson. A place to start is with “Self-Reliance.” Emerson’s idea of self-reliance can be understood in terms of a willingness to trust one’s own abnormal discourse, and to resist the normative  Rorty, Social Hope, 66.  Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 11. 32 33

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pressures to conform to the normal discourse. “Society is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members….The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.”34 It might sound as if Emerson were advocating a kind of irresponsible disregard for society and work, but that is not it. Also in “Self-Reliance” Emerson says, “A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.” 35 It is not responsibility we dislike, it is responsibility that we do not recognize as our own. The German poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal once said in a public speech that “life becomes livable only through a system of genuine obligations.”36 We are oppressed by conformity because it foists upon us responsibilities we do not recognize as our own. Deliverance comes when we discover our own genuine responsibilities. These will be precisely our own, and hence will be sui generis, outside the norm, abnormal. With our genuine responsibilities, our genuine work, life is bearable, or rather, better than bearable, joyful. Emerson says, “Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.” 37 After Rorty, this claim can be described in terms of relativism and redescription. Good and bad get their value from my description, and my description will always be a redescription compared to the norm, the conventional description. “The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force.” 38 Here Emerson sounds as Nietzschean as he does Rortyan. What makes life bearable for Nietzsche as well as for Emerson is claiming the power that is rightfully yours. Conformity requires the relinquishment of power. A low common denominator of power is the norm. Claiming one’s power, especially one’s power of intellect, is abnormal and normatively discouraged. What enhances our power is useful,  Emerson, Essays, 261.  Ibid., 260. 36  Cited by J.  C. Nyíri, “Wittgenstein’s Later Work in relation to Conservativism” in Wittgenstein and his Times: Anthony Kenny, Brian McGinness, J.  C. Nyíri, Rush Rhees, G. H. von Wright edited by Brian McGinness (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 54. 37  Ibid., 262. 38  Ibid., 263. 34 35

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what inhibits it is less useful. In a very Nietzschean phrase, or a clear source for Nietzsche’s own phrases, Emerson says, “Power is in nature the essential measure of right.” 39 The only criterion Rorty recognizes for better or worse is that which is more useful or less. The problem with conformity, with bowing to normal usages, according to Emerson, is it compromises that which would be more useful to us. In a very Rortyan gesture, Emerson says, “I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.” That is pure Rorty, or, rather, Rorty is pure Emerson. This is exactly how Rorty conceives a redescription to work. Certain words are given a pejorative cast, while others are privileged and promoted. “Truth” is to accrue a pejorative cast, what is more “useful” becomes the way of describing what we prefer for the future. As Rorty says, sounding like Emerson, “anything could be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed.”40 Truth becomes “an empty compliment.” Here is Rorty’s description of the method of redescription: “The method is to redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it, thereby causing them to look for appropriate new forms of nonlinguistic behavior, for example, the adoption of new scientific equipment or new social institutions.”41 This is just what Emerson was doing, and he knew what he was doing, as the very intentional ‘let’s make talk about the importance of conforming sound ridiculous’ makes clear, and way before the postmodern Rorty ever said anything like this. A final example of how Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” anticipates much that the postmodern Rorty will claim for his “neo-pragmatism,” (not that Rorty claims to be a “neo-pragmatist,” he only claims to be a pragmatist, nor does he claim to be doing something totally new or original; he only claims that this is what he thinks people need to hear, just as Emerson so thought), has to do with the nature of his self-described “relativism.” This is what Rorty says: Insofar as ‘postmodern’ philosophical thinking is identified with a mindless and stupid cultural relativism—with the idea that any fool thing that calls  Ibid., 272.  Rorty, Contingency, 7. 41  Ibid., 9. 39 40

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itself culture is worthy of respect—then I have no use for such a thing. But I do not see that what I have called ‘philosophical pluralism’ entails any such stupidity. The reason to try persuasion rather than force, to do our best to come to terms with people whose convictions are archaic and ingenerate, is simply that using force, or mockery, or insult, is likely to decrease human happiness.42

Having “no use” for something is about the worst thing that Rorty can say about something. The only thing worse is when he calls something “stupid.” Here is Emerson in a similar vein: The populate think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be shriven. You may fulfil your round of duties by clearing yourself in the direct, or in the reflex way. Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard and absolve me to myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of duty to many offices that are called duties. But if I can discharge its debts, it enables me to dispense with the popular code. If anyone imagine that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.43

I find in these two passages, the one from Rorty and the other from Emerson, the same ideas. There is the idea that a certain relativism does not mean that there are no standards. There are standards, they are just not absolute standards or based on eternal truths, but will be somewhat ad hoc, situational, and changing over time. Another idea is that, that kind of relativism, the kind that recognizes no standards, is self-indulgent and a relinquishment of responsibility, whereas this positive form of relativism, with standards, is a full and committed acceptance of one’s genuine responsibilities. This relativism is not easy. It is the hardest thing we have to do. It is also the case that doing it, living up to it, will be not only the most gratifying life, but the only gratifying life. It is interesting to note that just a little earlier in the same essay, Emerson had said, “I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.” Two of  Rorty, Social Hope, 276.  Emerson, Essays, 274.

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those reappear on the second list of things that he accepts as his responsibilities. This is relativism, then, but not without standards. The difference, the standard, is when his genius calls. The idea seems to be that he cannot be there at all, cannot accept, say, father and mother, authentically, as an authentic, a genuine responsibility, if he does not accept his genius first. Rorty says something similar. The standard he is committed to is the amelioration of human suffering. There may be other ways to get people to act in ways that seem to you more appropriate, more useful socially, and we have a responsibility to that end, but one’s deeper responsibility, one’s genuine responsibility dictates persuasion over force, because that is only way consistent with the overarching standard, the reduction of human suffering. An even more subtle line of Rorty-like thinking occurs throughout Emerson’s essay “Circles.” The first paragraph of the essay ends with the sentence, “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning….” 44 “Truth” here is certainly ironic, for what is claimed for the “truth,” immediately following the announcement of the truth, is that there is no truth. Every ‘truth’ admits of being undone by a further ‘truth,’ around every account, a larger account can be drawn. The horizon we see, once we arrive there, becomes the center for a new and even more distant horizon. This is what Rorty means by a redescription, a new circle is drawn. Each new circle is, initial, always a form of abnormal discourse. As the discourse of any drawn circle becomes normalized, a new horizon begins to appear off in the conceptual distance. Everything is relative and relational, for Emerson, as it is for Rorty. “Permanence is but a word of degrees.” 45 “Our culture is the predominance of an idea which draws after it this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise into another idea: they will disappear.” 46 Emerson does not specify what the idea is that “draws after it this train of cities,” but the need he sees for a new idea is clear enough. What he seems to be describing is what we would call today ‘ideology’: the way an idea, or ideas, determine the lives of people in the cities. The idea that I would say he has in mind, although not specified, but one repeatedly returned to in many of his essay, is what we would call today the idea of  Ibid., 403.  Ibid., 403. 46  Ibid., 403. 44 45

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capitalism. It is not that Emerson is anti-capitalism so much as he recognizes the limits of capitalism to help us bear reality. There is a higher idea than capitalism, one that will serve much better the project of bearing reality, that will prove much more useful, and that idea is Nature. The way to draw this new circle, the way to rise into another idea is very Rortyan. It is to put forth a new idea. That, that new idea would be ‘nature,’ no doubt, Rorty would oppose. Rorty would oppose ‘nature’ as the new idea because ‘nature’ seems to imply essences, ways things ought to be, by nature, which is just more truth-talk and violence to those who are attracted to other ways of being than those the hegemonic language users identify as natural. This would, however, be a misreading of Emerson. ‘Nature,’ for Emerson, is just the ability to “rise to a new idea.” It is the propensity in nature to generate new circles beyond circles, and in us to see new circles beyond the circles we see. Rorty wants us to give up using truth language. The reason is that truth language entails violence. Here we see why. Truth language denies ambiguity. We live amidst ambiguity. Those who use truth language, therefore, deny the reality of our existence, which is oppressive and violent. Rorty, however, misses the ambiguity of truth talk. Truth talk is itself subject to the sorites paradox. The polarities I will call Good Truth and Bad Truth, but, as we will see, these extremes are themselves subject to ambiguation. Good Truth------------//////////////////////-----------Bad Truth —(Penumbra)

Bad Truth is the use of truth talk that assumes a position of authority, that denies ambiguity, that oppresses and does violence to the experiences of others. Good truth talk is the kind of truth talk that recognizes that what one thought was true is not. Good truth talk, therefore, will tend to be negative, a realization about what is not true rather than an affirmation of something as true. The ambiguities of the poles are that Good Truth talk can be bad if too extreme, if the result is a paralyzing skepticism. Bad Truth talk can be good when paralyzing skepticism threatens. Sometimes our beliefs need to be ambiguated (Good Truth talk) and sometimes our beliefs need to be reinforced (Bad Truth talk). The goal is the penumbral ideal of sufficient conviction to act and do, combined with sufficient awareness of ambiguity to be able to change one’s mind in the face of compelling evidence. The word from pragmatism, specifically from Peirce, but used by James and Dewey, for this condition is “fallibilism.”

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Fallibilism, one might say, is the heart of postmodernism. The “suspicion of metanarratives” that Lyotard uses to define postmodernism is precisely a description of fallibilism. It is not a denial of any particular metanarrative, but a skepticism about any particular metanarrative’s absolute truth (Bad Truth talk). What I am calling Bad Truth, which is only relatively bad, not absolutely or truly bad, Cavell associates with what Emerson calls “clutching.” Cavell quotes a line from “Experience” to introduce the idea of ‘clutching’: “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.” 47 I will just note here Emerson’s play amidst great grief. The essay “Experience” is prompted by the death of his son Waldo. It is Emerson’s attempt at, as Sharon Cameron says, “representing grief,” and yet there is the almost horrible pun of “handsome.” Almost horrible because to pun when talking about the death of one’s son is almost too cruel. Almost horrible because the lesson of “Experience” is that there is nothing else but play for mortal stakes. Cavell compounds the almost horribleness of it by adding a further dimension to the pun, and a pun of his own, “I assume that Emerson wants the autoerotic force projected in his connection of hand and objects….” “Projected,” indeed. And yet, that is the point that Emerson is making, that the hand is the source of generation (in writing, especially) as well as a temptation to misuse, “clutching.” There is no getting away from the ambiguities. Cavell identifies what he takes to be the opposite of “clutching,” “Clutching’s opposite, which would be the most handsome part of our condition, is I suppose the specifically human form of attractiveness— attraction being another tremendous Emersonian term or master-tone, naming the rightful call we have upon one another….”48 Again, there is a sorites: ­Attraction----------//////////////////////---------------Clutching

Clutching would be associated with Bad Truth, attractiveness with leaving a Bad Truth behind to follow some more attractive version of the truth. Still, there will be a time to clutch, a time to take things in hand,

 Ibid., 473. In Cavell, Etudes, 117.  Cavell, Etudes, 117.

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and a time to let things go, to follow some object or idea or person that attracts you. Emerson’s reference to the lubricity of objects is an expression, first, of his disgust. This lubricity is the most unhandsome part of our experience. “Unhandsome” here means aesthetically unappealing, but also ungraspable (by the hand). It is ungraspable because it is normatively forbidden territory. It is not to be spoken of or acknowledged. This is Emerson’s first response, to loss, to death, to the experience of finding everything too slippery to grasp. In every Emerson essay there are turns, always more than one, where he changes his mind. He is not particularly secretive about this. He says quite explicitly, “Our moods do not believe in each other.”49 Across the course of an essay Emerson will inhabit various moods. The moods will be different and so what he will have to say from the perspective of the new mood will seem contradictory to what he said earlier in another mood. What maintains the consistency is Emerson’s intent to honor the mood he is in as he is in it. That means that he will change his mind. In “The American Scholar” Emerson quotes Epictetus (he refers to him as “the old oracle”), “‘All things have two handles: beware of the wrong one.’” 50 This oracular saying is more complicated than it looks. It looks like there is a right handle and a wrong handle, but that is not quite right. In fact, the wrong handle is the one you are used to, and the right handle is just the other handle. A little later in “The American Scholar” Emerson refers to: That great principle of Undulation in nature, that show itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; and as yet more deeply ingrained in very atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity,—these “fits of easy transmission and reflection,” as Newton called them, are the law of nature because they are the law of spirit. 51

The mistake is to deny this great principle of nature, the principle of undulation and polarity. The mistake is to think that only one of the handles is the right handle. In fact, authentic power consists of being able to grasp either handle with equal ease and equal effect.  Emerson, Essays, 406.  Ibid., 54. 51  Ibid., 62. 49 50

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Emersonian Hermeneutics In his first book, Nature (originally published in 1836), Emerson was already sounding vaguely Marxist when, in the section called “Commodity,” he describes commodity as “a benefit which is temporary and mediate, not ultimate….” 52 That is not the picture of commodities that late-stage capitalism paints. It is precisely as permanent and immediate good that commodities are portrayed. In the next year, 1837, in the essay “The American Scholar,” however, Emerson is sounding as radical as anything in Marx. He sets up his radical critique with an odd image based on an unspecified, but apparent, myth: “…the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.” 53 This is a faux teleological explanation of something. It is faux, not real, in the sense that there is no myth of Man being divided into men, except for Plato’s strange story, put in the mouth of Aristophanes in the Symposium, of Zeus splitting what people originally were, four legged, two faced, four armed creatures that locomoted by means of rolling, but were so complete in themselves that they failed to properly pay attention to the gods, and, for that reason, were split apart, “as an egg with a horsehair.” But this is not the myth Emerson is referring to because the image of the hand includes a split, the fingers, but also a unity, it is just one hand. So this passage would seem to be more of a glossing, in a poetico-mythic form, of what Emerson is imagining as a kind of ideal arrangement: a society in which the members are to some degree autonomous, but also deeply connected to one another, and working together toward a common goal, like a hand. It is unlikely to be accidental that Emerson chose the “hand” as the model of the social ideal realized structurally in a particular society. Sixty-­ one years earlier Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations (1776) with the famous description of “the invisible hand” that guides the commonweal toward the best when everyone acts, individually, selfishly: By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society  Ibid., 12.  Ibid., 53.

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that it was not part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.54

This, it seems to me, is the real myth that Emerson is referring to and lampooning. The idea of the “invisible hand” has been the staple of conservative, pro-capitalism discourse since Smith invented the image. It is as fake a myth as the myth of the gods splitting Man into men, and Emerson knows it. This is evident in the account that he gives of the current state of economic system, which is not an example of a well-ordered system guided by a benevolent hand, but a system of monsters stumbling around like a congregation of the living dead. In the next paragraph comes Emerson’s description of the Fall, which is the current state of his society as it appears to him: “But, unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man….Man is metamorphosed into a thing.”55 People have been transformed from those that use commodities as nature’s gifts to us, into commodities ourselves. We have been transformed from being producers to mere machines, the mechanisms that are the means of production. As Emerson says, “the soul is subject to dollars.”56

Emerson and Deleuze and Guattari: BwO’s This figure of “walking monsters—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow” is a good representation of what Žižek calls “organs without bodies” (OwB). Žižek’s idea of organs without bodies is an inversion of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s idea of “bodies without organs,” or, as it occurs in the translated form of Deleuze’s abbreviation, BwO’s. BwO’s are most 54  Smith, Adam, An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, edited by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Glasgow edition, 1981), 456. 55  Emerson, Essays, 54. 56  Ibid., 54.

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clearly represented in the form of an egg: “The BwO is an egg.”57 Elsewhere, Deleuze is a little clearer about what this means, “we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs….”58 Before I continue with Deleuze and Guattari, I will just point out that this is all already in Emerson. Here is Emerson in “Fate”: In science, we have to consider two things: power and circumstance. All we know of the egg, from each successive discovery, is, another vesicle, and if, after five hundred years, you get a better observer, or a better glass, he finds within the last observed another. In vegetable and animal tissue, it is just alike, and all that the primary power or spasm operates, is, vesicles, vesicles.59

A vesicle is just a body without organs like an egg. It is that of which all living things are essential comprised. It is a thing of pure potential, always being reproduced. It is the primary power, as I read it, in the spasm, and the spasm strikes me as fairly ejaculatory. Vesicles as Logos spermaticos. Back to Deleuze and Guattari. Another way that Deleuze and Guattari describe the BwO is in terms of “the field of immanence”: “The BwO is the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire (with desire defined as a process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it in).”60 The BwO, then, is about a kind of pure, but absolutely needed, potential. I use the qualifier “a kind of” because the potential is unlimited, but not completely open. The development of an egg will be according to the species to which the egg belongs, but at the egg stage, the particular development of the particular individual is at its maximum of potential being, and the minimum of its actual being. This is what Deleuze and Guattari mean by the “plain of immanence.” It is the plain of potential, from which what is imminent will emerge. The plain of consistency is the BwO that emerges from the plain of immanence. It is that to which you are faithful if you are faithful to the event of the emergence of your BwO.  They describe the plain of

57  Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 164. 58  Ibid., 153. 59  Emerson, Essays, 949. 60  Ibid., 154.

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consistency as both the “potential totality of all BwO’s”61 and as the BwO, simplicitur.62 It is the logic of a particular BwO, and each BwO has its own logic. What are the “organs” that we must dispense with in order to “make” our BwO? There are two ways of thinking about what these organs are. One is that they are habits we have acquired, that is, made for ourselves. We need to shed these habits because they have become bad. They have instilled in us false, rigid, joyless patterns of behavior. We need to recover our sense of our potential, our true desires, our authentic responsibilities in order to recover our sense of joy. The term “body without organs” originates from Antonin Artaud’s radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947): When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.63

The equation here is between organs = automatic reactions, which are both inherently bad in themselves, but also, some are worse than others. In the language of Epicurus, the worst of our “organs” would be the unnatural, unnecessary desires we have made a staple of our lives. In the language of ‘drive versus desire,’ they are socially constructed desires that we do not recognize or experience as really our own. They are the result of what we thought we wanted, but misperceived. They themselves once emerged as BwO’s, then developed “organs,” our reified mortality. We exist as BwO’s botched or re-organed. Deleuze and Guattari considerably complicate the idea of BwO’s from that of the passing reference given by Artaud. We pursue our BwO as an act of denial, a denial of our mortality, out of exasperation with our bodies and their fallible, dictating organs. And, if it is just a fleeing, we botch it. The types of botched versions of BwO’s are the “hypochondriac body,” “the schizo body,” and “the masochistic body.” Of these forms they say, “Why such a dreary parade of sucked-dry, catatonicized, vitrified, sewn-up bodies, when the BwO is also full of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance?”  Ibid., 157.  Ibid., 157-158. 63  Antonin Artaud. “To Have Done with the Judgment of God” in Selected Writings. Susan Sontag (ed). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976, p. 571. 61 62

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How, then, is it done right? This is what they say: This is how it should be done. Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continua of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO.64

This passage, as difficult and jargon-y as it is, perfectly correlates with what Emerson says and does. It describes what Emerson does when he goes to write a lecture or essay. He goes to his study, posts Whim on his door (not literally, but it is clear that no one is to disturb him, and he has no justification for this indulgence except the work he produces), and begins to reflect on his condition (“Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment…”). He is all reception, he muses, he Zimzums, which is the way he veers from his ordinary ways of thinking and moves into new realms of thought: he finds “potential movements of deterritorialization….” There is a flow of energy, of ideas, and, as his imagination works, as he follows out its working, he ascends into new realms, new strata, of thought. Deleuze and Guattari use the metaphor of a “plateau”: “A plateau is a piece of immanence. Every BwO is made up of plateaus. Every BwO is itself a plateau in communication with other plateaus on the plane of consistency. The BwO is a component of passage.”65 Emerson’s image for this process is the circle. “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”66 That is from “Circles,” and later in that essay Emerson uses a different metaphor that even more closely approaches that of the “plateau” used by Deleuze and Guattari: “Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder; the steps are actions, the new prospect is power. Every several result is threatened and judged by that which follows. Every one contradicted by the new, it is only limited by the new. The new statement is  Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 161.  Ibid., 158. 66  Emerson, Essays, 403. 64 65

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always hated by the old, comes like an abyss of skepticism. But the eye soon gets wont to it….” 67 To draw a new circle is to ascend to a new plateau, to take a step upward on the “mysterious ladder” is to make for oneself a new BwO, one that contradicts the previous body with its organs, and finds new power in a new potential for new developments. For Deleuze and Guattari, as it is for Emerson, it is absolutely imperative that we pursue our BwO: “Find your body without organs. Find out how to make it. It’s a question of life and death, youth and old age, sadness and joy. It is where everything is played out.”68 In order to “find our body without organs we must first “dismantle our self.”69 The self that must be dismantled (he also refers to “forgetting”: “Substitute forgetting for anamnesis”70) is the self of ‘desire,’ the self that is the ideological construct of hegemonic capitalism. The BwO we must build is the thing of ‘drive.’ It is our own true responsibility to our self, which we realize in relation to others (“there is always a collectivity, even when you are alone”). At the same time, however: “You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit.”71 Emerson says, “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”72

Žižek and the OwB Deleuze and Guattari make a passing reference, in A Thousand Plateaus, to organs without bodies: “A” stomach, “an” eye, “a” mouth: the indefinite article does not lack anything; it is not indeterminate, but expresses the pure determination of intensity, intensive difference. The indefinite article is the conductor of desire. It is not at all a question of a fragmented, splintered body, of organs without the body (OwB). The BwO is exactly the opposite. There are not organs in the sense of fragments in relation to a lost unity, nor is there a return to the undifferentiated in relation to a differentiable totality. There is a distribution

 Ibid., 405.  Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 151. 69  Ibid. 70  Ibjid. 71  Ibid., 150. 72  Emerson, Essays, 413. 67 68

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of intensive principles of organs, with their positive indefinite articles, within the collectivity or multiplicity, inside the BwO. Logos spermaticos.73

This passage is based on a central opposition, the opposition of the BwO to the idea of an OwB. The “it” of “It is not at all a question of fragmented, splintered body, or organs without a body” refers simultaneously to the use of the indefinite article associated with an organ, and it refers to, indirectly but specifically, to the BwO. The question is: how do we understand the use of indefinite articles in connection with the names of organs in relation to the BwO? The answer is that the indefinite article identifies an intensity, and this intensity is linked to a desire in the BwO. “A” stomach hungers; “an” eye searches; “a” mouth consumes. And so an organ that is not part of a BwO would be, indeed, an organ without a body, a fragmented, splintered thing. That is precisely Emerson’s point in talking about “a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow” walking around the city. It is an image of organs without bodies. It is an image of people who have become fragmented, splintered. Žižek sees between the BwO and the OwB a polarity, a twin logic, between which we must constantly move. He introduces this idea with a question: “Is this opposition of the virtual as the site of productive Becoming and the virtual as the site of the sterile Sense-Event not, at the same time, the opposition of the “body without organs (BwO) and the “organs without body (OwB)?”74 The “virtual” I understand as pure potential, the not yet symbolized, the not yet experienced. There are, in Žižek’s presentation, two virtuals. The virtual that functions like the pure potentiality of Becoming, and the virtual that functions like the pure potentiality of perceiving, the Sense-Event. He elaborates on his earlier question with two additional questions: “Is, on the one hand, the productive flux of pure Becoming not the BwO, the body not yet structured or determined as functional organs? And, on the other hand, is the OwB not the virtuality of the pure affect extracted from its embeddedness in a body, like the smile in Alice in Wonderland that persists alone, even when the Cheshire cat’s body is no longer present?”75 Žižek associates the OwB with

 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 164-65,  Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004), 30. 75  Ibid. 73 74

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“the gaze itself as such an autonomous organ no longer attached to a body.” What does this have to do with Emerson? It seems to me that Emerson is always describing the same processes, the same logics, that Deleuze and Guattari and Žižek are describing, although in with a different vocabulary. Emerson’s idea of polarity is a movement between two extremes, extremes that can be described in a variety of different ways, but include body and soul, the physical and the spiritual, nominalist and realist. At each extreme, a different logic obtains. There is a logic of the physical realm and a logic of the spiritual realm, and, furthermore, these logics do not believe in each other. When in a nominalist mood, realists look like crazy people. When in a realist mood, nominalists look dull and unable to see the real that is clearly present and working in things. That the OwB is associated with pure gaze recalls for me the image drawn by Christopher Pearse Cranch circa 1836 of Emerson as a “transparent eyeball,” an eyeball on two stick legs walking across a landscape. That image is exactly what Emerson seems to describe in Nature, and it is what Žižek seems to be describing when he describes the OwB as the “Sense-Event,” an experience of pure, receptive (hence “sterile”) seeing. The Cheshire cat’s smile without its body, Emerson’s eye, by itself, moving across the landscape. I understand both Emerson and Deleuze and Guattari to be saying that finding ourselves at these extremes is inevitable, but freedom, health, power is discovered in the movement between them. I find that there is no postmodern wildness of ideas that is wilder than the ideas that are already there in Emerson.

PART III

Emerson and…

CHAPTER 6

Emerson and Žižek: On the Crack in Everything, or, the Dialectical Nature of Philosophy and the World

“There is a crack in everything….”1 —Emerson, “Compensation” “…the crack in the positive order of being….”2 —Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

It is surprising to me to find such a similar description of reality, using the identical word, “crack,” in Emerson and Žižek. It is, no doubt, an odd connection to make, between the nineteenth-century one-time Unitarian minister, homey lecturer, writer of aphoristic essays Ralph Waldo Emerson and the ribald, dirty-joke-telling provocateur Slavoj Žižek. Emerson is rarely taken for a philosopher and Žižek is sometimes taken for a buffoon, but both are more serious philosophers than is sometimes seen and I think an important philosophical idea emerges more clearly from seeing them together. I believe that what Emerson means by saying “there is a crack in everything” and what Žižek means by describing a “crack in the order of being” is the same thing. The question is, what is this crack? Certainly, it is metaphorical. It is not a literal crack like the crack in a cup. Another word that Emerson uses for this crack is “polarity”: “Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters, in male and female; in the 1 2

 Emerson, Essays, 292.  Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 10.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Gilmore, Emerson as Philosopher, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32546-5_6

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inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the animal body; in the systole and diastole of the heart; in the undulations of fluids, and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity.”3 Žižek describes it in terms of the “internal struggle of opposites…antagonism as the constitutive contradiction of an entity with itself: things come to be out of their own impossibility, the external opposite that poses a threat to their stability is always the externalization of their immanent self-­ blockage and inconsistency.”4 Beauvoir, paraphrasing Sartre, I believe, is referring to this crack when she describes a human being as a “being whose being is not to be.”5 That is, human beings, us, we experience our being as a kind of incompleteness, as not done, as needing something more or other or else. As Stanley Cavell has put it, putting Emerson in a list along with Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Freud, “the attempt in every work to do what has never been done, because what is known is known to be insufficient, or worse.”6 In some sense, this idea of a crack in things is an ancient idea in the history of philosophy. It certainly goes back to Heraclitus, who compares the existence of things in the world to a strung bow or lyre: “They do not apprehend how being at variance it agrees with itself: there is a back stretched connexion, as in the bow and the lyre.”7 What seems one and static contains within itself a principle of opposition, a tension, a crack. Even more interesting to me is to find the same idea, or a very similar idea, in Anaximander, the second philosopher in the history of Western philosophy, whose apeiron is in a continual process of diremption and reunification, “according to necessity.”8 Everything is apeiron and everything has within it dual principles of antagonism (against itself) and attraction (to itself). Everything has a kind of “crack” in it. There is a question about whether the crack is in things themselves or just in our own eye, like the scotoma. I will address that question before I am done.

 Emerson, Essays, 286-7.  Žižek, Sex, 5. 5  Beauvoir, Ethics, 10. 6  Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 195-96. 7  G. S. Kirk & J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 193. 8  Ibid., 107. 3 4

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Emerson and Žižek are in this tradition. Where we have only fragments from Anaximander and Heraclitus, the idea of a crack in everything pervades the extensive writings of both Emerson and Žižek. Furthermore, this idea of a crack pervades the history of philosophy itself. This claim is made by Emerson himself in the essay “Nominalist and Realist” where he claims everyone is both, sometimes one and sometime the other according to different “moods”: “every man is partialist…and now I add, that every man is universalist also….”9 “We are,” says Emerson, “amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of faculties, the particular and the catholic.”10 He calls these different moods, and I have no better term for the different states, the different perspectives, but when we shift from one to the other it is as if the whole world shifts at the same time. As he says in “Circles,” “Our moods do not believe in each other.” 11 It is as though we are strangers to ourselves from one mood to the next, and furthermore, we know this about ourselves. As Emerson says in “Nominalist and Realist,” “I am always insincere, as always knowing there are other moods.”12 When we are actively doing things we are nominalists, when we are thoughtful we become realists, which is Emerson’s word for an idealist. Emerson describes the history of philosophy itself as a dialectic of these different moods, at different times one mood dominating, but always containing within it the seed of its opposite. Plato, by his Idealism (realism) summons forth Aristotle’s nominalism as sure as the systole of the heart will be followed by diastole. In the essay “Circles” Emerson describes this shift from one mood to another, from one worldview to another, in terms of drawing a new circle around an existing circle. “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning….” Peirce is rather dismissive of Emerson, but the logic of this redrawing of circles is Peircean. I am in my present mood, I see the world in a particular way (Peirce’s Firstness). I now see that this way is incomplete, unsatisfying, somehow wrong, which leads to some form of inquiry, Peirce’s Secondness. I affirm a new way of seeing the world, which is now a new circle for me, Peirce’s Thirdness. The point I want to make about this redrawing of a circle is that for Emerson, as it is,  Emerson, Essays, 585-86.  Ibid., 577. 11  Ibid., 406. 12  Ibid., 587. 9

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I think, for Peirce, it is experienced as a kind of leap, a sudden gestalt shift, a change of aspect like suddenly seeing the duck when you had previously only seen the rabbit. Emerson describes the phenomenology of this transition as “if the soul is quick and strong, it bursts over the boundary on all sides, and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with the attempt to stop and to bind.”13 Presumably, the evidence for what is lacking in one’s current perspective accumulates gradually, but the shift to a new perspective, a new mood, in Emerson’s vocabulary, seems to happen more or less all of a sudden. To the question of what difference it would make to understand that there is a crack in everything, the answer is: Power. Power and joy, which are two words for the same thing. Emerson says in “Self-Reliance,” “Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.”14 This experience of transition is the drawing of a new circle and it is thrilling. It is the wonder that is associated with the beginning of philosophy, as both Plato and Aristotle say. There is a temptation to see in this wisdom a doctrine of fate, an idea of our powerlessness in the face of Nature doing what it does of necessity. Anaximander’s necessity. Emerson’s paradoxical response to this temptation is to describe our condition as fated to be free. Emerson says in the essay “Fate,” “freedom is necessary” and “fate is the freedom of man”15 and he speaks of the “Beautiful Necessity,” a formulation he uses three times in two paragraphs.16 How do we unpack such an enigmatic paradox? By “fate” Emerson means the particular character we have been given by nature, by, as it were, the combination of our parents’ DNA and the circumstances of our lives. Our “thrownness,” to use a Heidegger term. Our freedom is to accept our particular individuality for what it is and to be true to it, which is to say, to work to manifest it in the world. What Emerson calls “self-reliance.” This project of manifesting our individual identity in the world has a dual goal and comes from dual impulses. On the one hand, we want to maximize our personal presence in the world. On the other hand, we also  Ibid., 404.  Ibid., 271. 15  Ibid., 953. 16  Ibid., 967. 13 14

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want to contribute to the good of our communities and ultimately to the future of humanity in general. These two impulses are linked. What we have to offer our community is our own sense of what would be most beautiful for it, our own sense of justice and good. These twin projects are conducted in the form of experiments, or, to use Emerson’s word, “essays.” We do not know what we are until we try to express ourselves in the world. This is an empirical process of attempts and failures and retries until something seems to work. “Working” is marked by our own satisfaction as well as the by the approval of those around us. For this reason, every person represents a new possibility for the way future people will be. We do not know what the future will need for human beings, so we do not know now which human beings are most needed. Emerson sums this up in “Nominalist and Realist” by saying, “Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much.”17 I take Emerson to be strongly influenced by the Stoic principle that, first of all, the microcosm recapitulates the macrocosm, and, second, that, that is a normative principle, but normative not in a moralistic way so much as normative in the way of ecstasy. Back to the essay “Compensation,” where a number of the themes that I have been stressing get expressed: An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as spirit matter; man, woman; odd, even; subject, object; in, out; upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay. Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The entire system of things gets represented in every particle.18

The normative dimension here is that the proper way to be in such a nature, in a nature that is dual, is to remain in motion, to keep moving between the extremes, to keep thinking. To stop the movement, to settle on some One, is to stop thinking, is to stop growing. Emerson gives a kind of overview in the following extended quotation: The changes which break up at short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements of a nature whose law is growth. Every soul is by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole system of things, its friends, and home, and laws, and faith, as the shell-fish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case,  Ibid., 583.  Ibid., 287.

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because it no longer admits of growth, and slowly forms a new house. In proportion to the vigor of the individual, these revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessant, and all worldly relations hang very loosely about him, becoming, as it were, transparent fluid membrane through which the living form is seen, and not, as in most men, an indurated heterogeneous fabric of many dates, and of no settled character, in which the man is imprisoned. Then there can be enlargement, and the man of to-­ day scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday. 19

In “Fate” he refers to this as ‘obeying our polarity’ and that, if we do obey our polarity, “Life is an ecstasy.” 20 I take that as a literal ecstasy, literally ex-stasis: standing outside one’s self. A leaving of one’s prior self for a new self like the lobster its exoskeleton. But also with the traditional association of ecstasy with joy. In this respect Emerson veers from the Stoic way. A life so lived is lived with a sense of meaning, of constant discovery, of wonder. That is the normative dimension of Emerson’s understanding, the “should” of joy. That is how Emerson writes his essays, obeying his polarities. Hence, they careen from one extreme to another. They are full of cracks. F. O. Matthiessen refers, querulously, to Emerson’s “inveterate habit of stating things in opposites.”21 H.  L. Menken refers to his “mellifluous obscurity.”22 Leslie Fiedler refers to his “willfully incoherent essays.”23 These are just a sampling of criticisms, but there is a theme. With Emerson, the enunciation recapitulates the enunciated. In his essays he is thinking, which is to say, he changes his mind. Perhaps the most generous, but also the most accurate way to describe his thinking and his writing is to call it dialectical, as is, according to Emerson, the world. Žižek says that his book Sex and the Failed Absolute, is “an attempt to provide the basic ontological frame of my entire work—as close as I will ever get to presenting a philosophical system….”24 It is a book full of his  Ibid., 301-02.  Ibid., 963. 21  F. O. Matthiessen, “In the Optative Mood,” in Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell, edited by David LaRocca (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 435. 22  H. L. Mencken, “An Unheeded Law-Giver,” in Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell edited by David LaRocca (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 374. 23  Leslie Fiedler, “Preface to Hitch Your Wagon to a Star,” in Estimating Emerson, 662. 24  Žižek, Sex, 12. 19 20

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usual provocations, as are Emerson’s essays with his, although their styles are quite different. In it Žižek intentionally and explicitly recapitulates the enunciated in the enunciation: “A careful reader will notice how the structure of each of the book’s four parts echoes, reproduces even, the basic ontological matrix promoted by the book….”25 The subject of the book can be said to be a re-thinking of “dialectical materialism.” This new form of dialectical materialism is fundamentally paradoxical, and Žižek is fascinated by, and uses as illustrations throughout the book, the paradoxical figures of the Möbius strip, the cross-cap, and the Klein bottle, all of which create a space that Žižek describes as “unorientable.” The first premise of the book Žižek says is “that the theoretical space of dialectical materialism is exactly such a convoluted space, and that it is this convolution, this self-­ relating circular movement of falling-back-into-oneself, which distinguishes dialectical materialism proper from other forms of pseudo-dialectical materialism which merely assert the nature of reality as an eternal struggle of opposites.”26 Žižek, in four bullet points, contrasts what he calls “dialectics” with “metaphysics.” Summarized, they are 1. Dialectics does not regard nature as a “connected and integral whole.” 2. Dialectics holds that “nature is not a state of rest and immobility, stagnation and immutability, but a state of continuous movement and change, of continuous renewal and development….” 3. “Dialectics does not regard the process of development as simply a process of growth…, but rapidly and abruptly, taking the form of a leap from one state to another.” 4. “Dialectics holds that internal contradictions are inherent in all things and phenomena of nature, for they all have their negative and positive sides….”27 All of these, it seems to me, are elements of Emerson’s vision of nature as well as his commitment to “dialectics” rather that metaphysics. A final point about the similarities between the philosophical visions of Emerson and Žižek is that the crack that defines the human is part of nature itself. Žižek calls it an “ontological parallax”: …parallax is the apparent displacement of an object…caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight. The philosophical twist to be added, of course, is that the observed difference is not simply  Ibid.  Ibid., 3. 27  Ibid., 3-4. 25 26

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“subjective,” is not due to the fact that the same object which exists “out there” is seen from two different stations, or points of view. It is rather that…subject and object are inherently “mediated,” so that an “epistemological” shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an “ontological shift in the object itself.28

This is just another way of saying what Emerson says in essay after essay. Towards the end of his introduction Žižek addresses an issue that I myself have felt in reading Žižek’s books (and not infrequently, reading Emerson’s essays). He says, I am well aware that this book may appear to some readers as somehow stuck halfway: while it tries to break out of the transcendental vicious cycle, its result is ultimately a negative one, i.e., it fails to deliver a new positive-­ realist vision of the universe—all it provides is a kind of empty space between the two (transcendental space and reality), a gesture thwarted in its own completion.29

This is a thought I have had reading Žižek. His brilliant argument for a particular idea or theory, and then the subsequent equally brilliant argument for its opposite ultimately does not seem to go anywhere. At the end of a book, I have enjoyed the process, but would be hard pressed to say what the book itself was about, if it was about anything. To this reproach that his arguments do not seem to go anywhere Žižek replies in this most explicit explanation of his ideas and methods as follows: …this thwarted identity is my vision of the Real, it is the basic condition of our lives. Caught in the horizon of metaphysical expectations, my critics don’t see that what they (mis)perceive as an intermediate state of passage already is the final result they are looking for—or, to use the mathematical term used in this book, they constrain the unorientable surface into the horizon of “orientable” progress.30

I am chagrined. I am myself reproached. I was expecting, demanding, something orientable, when what I was getting was pure thinking, pure human being, which is a thing whose being is not to be. As with Emerson,  Ibid., 5.  Ibid., 12-13. 30  Ibid., 13. 28 29

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for whom the “transition” is the point, for Žižek, too, in almost the identical language, identifies the “intermediate state of passage” as the point. The point of the text, like the point of life, is the text itself, the life itself. Every text, like every life, has a crack in it. It is, as singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen says, “how the light gets in”: Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in.31

The Handsome Absolute To continue to explore the surprising reverberations of Emerson’s philosophy in the philosophy of Slavoj Žižek, and to use Žižek’s philosophy to recover the philosophy of Emerson, I want to pick up this idea from Leonard Cohen that it is precisely through the crack in everything that the light gets in. The ‘light getting in’ is a metaphor. It is a metaphor for the emergence in one realm of something from another realm. This can be taken as a description of thinking, authentic thinking. There is a kind of blank, a flatness of consciousness without thought. Call it Peircean Firstness. There is a disruption, the presence of a disrupting “real,” to use a Lacanian term, that, as it were, summons thought. In what seemed a static wholeness of a state of consciousness, in some mood, a crack appears. The Lacanian “real” Žižek describes as “a surplus,” “a kernel resisting symbolic integration-dissolution.”32 There is always the presence of the ‘real,’ like the scotoma in our vision. We are ‘beings whose being is not to be.’ It is the crack that is in everything. When we respond to it, identify it, acknowledge it we begin to think. Žižek says, the true enemy of the present book [Sex and the Failed Absolute] is not new realist visions but what one is tempted to call the fine art of non-thinking, an art which more and more pervades our public space: wisdom instead of

31   Link to lyrics for Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem.” https://qz.com/835076/ leonard-cohens-anthem-the-story-of-the-line-there-is-a-crack-in-everything-thats-how-the-­­ light-gets-in. 32  Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 3.

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thinking proper—wisdom in the guise of one-liners intended to fascinate us with their fake “depth.”33

Žižek goes on to describe what is, apparently, known as “Word Art.” Žižek calls it “the new kitsch” and gives the example of phrases plastered on the walls at McDonald’s restaurants. Therein resides the ideological function of Word Art wisdoms: while Word Art presents itself as a safe haven, a retreat from the madness of capitalist hyper-activity in reality it makes us the best participants in the game—we are taught to maintain the inner peace of not-thinking. The task of thinking is not to simply fill in this symbolic hole but to keep it open and render it operative in all its unsettling force, whatever the risks of this operation.34

The identification of the ideological function of Word Art strikes me as identical to what Emerson was criticizing in higher education in “The American Scholar.” Emerson says “Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing,” and, I take it, a “thing” precisely because it does not think, and then, “the soul is subject to dollars,”35 which could be gloss of the Žižek passage quoted above, or, rather, vice versa. What Žižek is describing is what Emerson calls, in “Self-Reliance,” “conformity,” which, again, is most significantly characterized by a non-thinking. Žižek associates thinking with ‘opening a hole’ and rendering it “operative in all of its unsettling force.” This too strikingly recalls Emerson’s analysis of intellect in the essay “Intellect.” That essay begins: Every substance is negatively electric to that which stands above it in the chemical tables, positively to that which stands below it. Water dissolves wood, and iron, and salt; air dissolves water; electric fire dissolves air, but the intellect dissolves fire, gravity, laws, method, and the subtlest unnamed relations of nature, in its resistless menstruum.

Intellect’s “resistless menstruum” could only be Emerson. “Menstruum” from the Latin mensis, meaning ‘monthly’. Menstruum means ‘solvent’ and, as is explained in the etymology of the word in the O. E. D., “by analogy of the supposed agency of a solvent in the transmutation of metals  Žižek, Sex, 13.  Ibid., 14. 35  Emerson, Essays, 54. 33 34

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into gold with the supposed action of the menses on the ovum.” Emerson, I believe, means all of this. I was at first puzzled by Emerson’s formulation that the “intellect dissolves.” I would have rather have said that the intellect, as it were, ‘solves.’ It fills in the holes of our knowledge, in our experiences. Reading Žižek it suddenly occurred to me that, in fact, the first act of intellect is actually to dissolve, to open a hole, to identify what is not whole in our knowledge and experience. The hole makes space for the unsymbolized, hence unrecognized, ‘real’ to become manifest. That is what initiates authentic thought. That is how the light gets in. How does this happen? Is there anything we can do to initiate this process, to cause this process, to invite this process? Emerson and Peirce have strikingly similar explanations for how we can make this happen, I would even say, Peirce because of Emerson. Again, and in both, there is a kind of dialectical saying and unsaying of what has been said. Emerson says, first, “The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion.” Then, “What has my will done to make me that I am? Nothing. I have been floated into this thought, this hour, this connection of events, by secret currents of might and mind…”36 But then, “Our thinking is a pious reception. Our truth of thought is therefore vitiated as much by too violent a direction given our will, as by too great a negligence. We do not determine what we will think. We only open our senses, clear away, as we can, all obstruction from the fact, and suffer the intellect to see.”37 So at first Emerson seems to be saying that there is nothing that we can do, that thought just happens, but then he says there is something we can do to bring on this onset of thought. We can adopt an attitude of reception. We can clear our mind as much as possible of our regular concerns. We “open our senses” and thoughts will emerge from, say, the hole that has been opened through the dissolution of the obstructions to thought. Here is Peirce’s version. He calls the process “musement” and here is how it works: “It begins passively enough with drinking in the impression of some nook in one of the three Universes. But impression soon passes into attentive observation, observation into musing, musing into a lively give and take of communion of self with self.”38 He sums up the process with almost a quotation from Emerson, “I should say, ‘Enter your skiff of Musement, push off into the lake of thought, and leave the breath of  Ibid., 418.  Ibid., 419. 38  Peirce, CW, 6.459. 36 37

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heaven to swell your sail….’”39 Both Emerson and Peirce use the metaphor of floating on water and being carried along as if by a current of wind. It is as though the thoughts were around us in Nature and we in them and if we make space for them in our mind they will enter our mind and become our thoughts. That is to say that ideas are ‘real.’ Peirce makes the distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘existence.’ “‘Real’ is a word invented in the thirteenth-­ century to signify having Properties, i.e. characters sufficing to identify their subject, and possessing these whether they be anywise attributed to it by any single man or group of men or not.”40 Peirce distinguishes that sense of ‘reality’ from the idea of ‘exists’: “I myself always use exist in its strict philosophical sense of ‘react with other like things in the environment.’” 41 ‘Reality’ and ‘existence’ therefore identify, as it were, two distinct ontologies, two distinct worlds, in an almost but not quite Kantian sense. That is to say, things that are ‘real’ are inherently non-corporeal while things that ‘exist’ are inherently corporeal. Signs are ‘real,’ as are the ‘personalities’ of things, which we identify via signs. The things themselves ‘exist.’ They “react with other like things in the environment.” Things that are ‘real,’ the real signs or personalities of things “identify their subject…whether anywise attributed to it by any single man or group of men or not.” Which is to say, there may be no one who has ever identified the reality of a particular personality, but that means nothing to the reality of that personality. This is how Peirce describes, defines, ‘personality’: …personality is some kind of coördination or connection of ideas. Not much to say, this, perhaps. Yet when we consider that, according to the principle which we are tracing out, a connection between ideas is itself a general idea…. This personality, like any general idea, is not a thing to be apprehended in an instant. It has to be lived in time; nor can any finite time embrace it in all its fullness. Yet in each infinitesimal interval it is present and living, though specially colored by the immediate feelings of that moment. Personality, so far as it is apprehended in a moment, is immediate self-­consciousness.42

 Ibid., 6.461.  Ibid., 6.453. 41  Ibid., 6.495. 42  Ibid., 6.155. 39 40

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Personality is a coördination of ideas within a larger enframing general idea that gives to the coördinated ideas their coördination. Circles within a circle. Furthermore, says Peirce of the word “coördination,” “it implies a teleological harmony in ideas, and in the case of personality this teleology is more than a mere purposive pursuit of a predeterminate end; it is a developmental teleology. This is personal character. A general idea, living and conscious now, it is already determinative of acts in the future to an extent to which it is now not conscious.” A “developmental teleology” completely undoes the metaphysical dimension of teleology. A “developmental teleology” is really just a gloss on what I have called Emerson’s “epistemology of circles.” Dean Buonomano describes the mind as “a time machine,” constantly looping forward and backward in time to anticipate and then create the future. As Buonomano says, “the brain is a time machine: a machine that not only tells time and predicts the future, but one that allows us to mentally project ourselves forward in time.”43 Tracking the trajectory of the activities of the mind it would look something like the symbol for infinity, but in dynamic motion, moving between past and future in looping circles of reflection and projection. Each prospective new circle functions as a developmental teleology. Thinking is just the process by which we draw a new circle, a new coördination of ideas. Each circle will have its own personality, in this sense, and with each new idea we have, our own personality will be changed to some small degree as all of our ideas will, to some small degree, have to recoördinate themselves to find their proper place, to find themselves in harmony with this new idea within this new circle. Emerson’s point is that not only do we think in “developmental teleologies,” nature itself, as it were, thinks in “developmental teleologies.” Take, as an example, the reality, the personality, of Darwinian evolution, which not even Peirce denies, although he wants to complicate it. Darwinian evolution was always a reality and it always had a personality. It is as if a couple of the pre-Socratics, namely Anaximander and Empedocles, got a whiff of the idea, but they could not quite read the signs completely. Evolution is real, but does not ‘exist.’ It is incorporeal, given only in signs. It has a specific personality, a coördination of many, many ideas, so that different species, each of which is itself a coördination of ideas, individual 43  Dean Buonomano, Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017), 16.

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members of the species coördinated by the general idea of the species itself, evolve according to different environmental pressures and those pressures are indicated in signs, and scientists attempting to read the signs can misread them, get them wrong, or get them right. There is definitely a right and wrong way to read the signs of the real. And what they are reading the signs for is to understand what to anticipate, how to work with, the general idea in the future. Given this distinction, ideas for Emerson and Peirce are ‘real.’ They do not ‘exist,’ but they are real and a person can be right or wrong about them. A person can get closer to understanding the real personality of an idea or farther away from it, just as Empedocles was approaching an idea that Darwin got much closer to. There is, it seems to me, some overlap between Žižek’s use of the Lacanian ‘real’ and Peirce’s use of the ‘real.’ That is, both function as a sign. It is a sign that manifests whether anyone can read it or does read it or not. The Lacanian ‘real’ is a sign that remains ‘unsymbolized,’ so it is a sign that, as it were, has not yet be read. It is an idea that has not yet been thought, a proto-circle that has not yet been drawn, but it is a real idea and therefore can be read. It can be thought. Of course, between the idea and the thought falls the shadow. The thought is not exactly an exact reproduction of the real that is thought of, but it is what we can think. Our thought will have a “crack” in it, and that crack is the crack of the real, the Lacanian real, which is also the crack in the real itself, some incompleteness, some being of a being that is not to be. It is precisely the real which summons thought. It is the receptiveness to the real that constitutes Peircean Musement and Emersonian Intellect. In a section of Sex and the Failed Absolute entitled “Modalities of the Absolute,” Žižek poses the question, “what is the Absolute?” The answer he gives is: Something that appears to us in fleeting experiences, say, through a gentle smile of a beautiful woman, or even through a warm caring smile of a person who otherwise may seem ugly and rude—in such miraculous, but extremely fragile moments another dimension transpires through our reality. As such, the Absolute is easily corroded, it all too easily slips through our fingers, and must be treated as carefully as a butterfly.44

 Žižek, Sex, 19.

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When Žižek says, “another dimension transpires through our reality,” I take that to be more than just a phenomenological remark, but I do not take it as a metaphysical remark. I take it as a semiotic remark. Signs emerge. Signs emerge as if from another dimension and that other dimension is the Absolute. Another word for the Absolute would be the Lacanian “real,” that is, the presence of a potentiality that is not yet symbolized, not yet thought. The emergence of the real into thought is a delicate, a fragile operation. The Lacanian “real” is “real” in the Peircean sense, in the sense of “having Properties, i.e. characters sufficing to identify their subject, and possessing these whether they be anywise attributed to it by any single man or group of men or not.” The difference between the Lacanian real and at least one subset of the Peircean real is that the Lacanian real identifies those potentialities that have not yet been “attributed,” not yet identified as signs. Emerson’s idea of “reception” is precisely identifying a receptivity to the Lacanian real, the manifestation of the Lacanian real, real (Peircean real) signs that are not yet recognized as signs, potential ideas, real (in the Peircean sense) proto-ideas that have not yet been thought. The moment of receptivity is, as Žižek says, “fragile.” Here is Emerson on the fragility of that moment. He is describing an experience of failed receptivity that I have considered before and that fascinated Cavell. Emerson describes it in terms remarkably similar to those used by Žižek: “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates.”45 Another word for the Absolute is Nature, symbolized and unsymbolized. Cavell picks up the theme of ‘clutching’ that is found in the Emerson quotation. Cavell says, “the unhandsome is rather what happens when we seek to deny the standoffishness of objects by clutching at them, which is to say, when we conceive thinking, say the application of concepts in judgments, as grasping something, say synthesizing.”46 The “standoffishness of objects” I will address later as an element of ‘resistentialism,’ but for now I would just like to redescribe this “standoffishness,” which Cavell associates with “synthesizing,” as a denial, on the part of the thinker, or rather, nonthinker, of the “crack,” of the ambiguity, of the inescapable presence of the Lacanian real, that which is not yet symbolized in one’s current  Emerson, Essays, 473.  Cavell, Etudes, 117.

45 46

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experience. That is the essence of being a being whose being is not to be. Our experience is always incomplete. Our experience, however, is not hopeless. Cavell goes on to characterize the opposite of clutching. “Clutching’s opposite, which would be the most handsome part of our condition, is I suppose the specifically human form of attractiveness—attraction being another tremendous Emersonian term or master-tone, naming the rightful call we have upon one another, and that I and the world make upon one another….”47 It is a nice and subtle move that Cavell makes here from “handsome” for what is there present to hand and can be, or not, clutched, to “handsome” as attractive, as an aesthetic concept. It is a move from something like efficient causality to final causality, but certainly in the Peircean sense of a developmental teleology, so that our attractions themselves develop, grow, become fruitful. Signs emerge, but from where? What is this Absolute or Nature from which the unsymbolized emerge to become susceptible of symbolization? The Nobel Prize winning scientist François Jacob describes the evolutionary origin of the lung: Lung development started in certain freshwater fishes living in stagnant pools lacking oxygen. They adopted the habit of swallowing air and absorbing oxygen through the walls of the esophagus. Under such conditions, enlargement of the surface area of the esophagus conferred a selective advantage. Diverticula of the esophagus appeared and, under continuous selective pressure, enlarged into lungs.48

I love that “diverticula…appeared.” Where there was no lung, a lung appeared. This, it seems to me, is the same process by which signs emerge or ideas occur to us. There is, as it were, an environmental niche, a coördination of circumstances in which certain potentialities begin to develop. In the case of the lung, there are the fish in the stagnant water, the oxygen absorbing esophagi, and the desire in the fish to reproduce. Diverticula will appear. All the signs were there, they just had to emerge into reality. There are natural processes, like tides and phases of the moon and seasons and storms and these processes are repeated and are, to some degree,  Ibid.  François Jacob, The Possible and the Actual (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 35. 47 48

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predictable and then there is the idea ‘Nature.’ Or, as Thales put it, “All is water.” After the darkness of “the most unhandsome part of our condition,” Emerson, a few pages later in the same essay, identifies a brighter note: …it is impossible that the creative power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes. The intellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, lover of absolute good, intervenes for our succor, and at one whisper of these high powers, we awake from ineffectual struggles….

The ”creator” here is just another word for what Žižek calls the Absolute and Emerson Nature. It is knowing that there is this door that fortifies and gives hope. “Absolute truth” and “absolute good” are the as yet unsymbolized real for which we strive and realize, for a moment, in the symbolization. There is the Firstness of Being. The Secondness of the sense that Being is incomplete. The Thirdness of a new symbolization that sutures the crack that appeared in Being. Then, the return to the Firstness of temporary Being. The “door” that Emerson refers to is the crack. It is how the light gets in. The light is the Absolute or Nature or the creator. It is a potentiality of a new circle. The new circle is itself just the symbolization of the as yet unsymbolized real that is real whether anyone thinks it or not. It is the lung-to-be of the diverticula. The door, Emerson says, is never closed, but we are sometimes closed to it. Just previous to Emerson’s description of the door that is never closed and the “creative power,” Emerson gives another description of “the most unhandsome part of our condition.” I see not, if one be once caught in this trap of so-called sciences, any escape for the man from the links of the chain of physical necessity. Given such an embryo, such a history must follow. On this platform, one lives in a sty of sensualism, and would soon come to suicide.

This is the perspective, and mood, of one who does not know about, or has lost the direction to, the door. I read “so-called sciences” to refer not to actual science or to what actual scientists do, which Emerson loved and who Emerson respected, but to a kind of forlorn scientistic attitude from which perspective everything seems predetermined and so hopeless. It is a

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perspective, and mood, that Emerson can describe so well because he well knew it. “Experience” is, after all, about the loss of his son Waldo. “Our moods,” Emerson says, “do not believe in each another.” Cavell has beautifully called Emerson a “philosopher of moods.”49 In one mood the door is open and the thoughts are pouring in. In another mood, there is no door. There is only despair. Or, perhaps, the door is open and our mood cannot not be ecstatic. Or, the door is closed, for whatever reason, and our mood is dour. Wittgenstein says, “The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.”50 I take it that, that is categorical. The entire world is different. It shifts all together like the duck/rabbit. A similar shift occurs, I want to say, whether one lives in the world of the “so-called sciences” or in the world of science, which includes the Absolute or Nature or the crack in everything, which, in science, is just fallibilism and further experimentation. The same obtains in reading Emerson. That is, you can read Emerson, as it were, literally, and he sounds like a mystic and a fabulist. That is the way, it seems to me, that, for example, Santayana reads Emerson.51 Or, you can read him “awry,” as in “looking awry.” Žižek gets this phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet when the queen is talking with her aid Bushy and Bushy says to her “Like perspectives, which rightly gaz’d upon / Show nothing but confusion; ey’d awry / Distinguish form.”52 The crack is there in the metaphor, you look rightly and see nothing, you look awry, oddly, aslant (Emily Dickenson’s word), Žižek calls it the “metaphor of anamorphosis,”53 and there it is. The door opens. The crack lets the light in.

 Cavell, Etudes, 26.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus translated by D.  F. Pears & B. F. McGuinness (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 6.43. 51  George Santayana, “Emerson” in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), 217-233. Santayana says of Emerson things like, “At bottom he had no doctrine at all” (218) and “his thoughts, untamable in their quiet irresponsibility” (220) and “his occasional thin paradoxes and guileless whims” (220). When I first read Emerson, that is how I read him too. 52  Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 10. 53  Ibid. 49 50

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Response to a Possible Objection I have been arguing that for Emerson, as well as for Žižek, we think dialectically, the world worlds dialectically, that our life in this world is dialectical. Life, in short, I have been arguing, is dialectics. It occurs to me that someone could say, “Wait a minute, I am reading Emerson’s essay ‘Experience’ and it says right here, it says: ‘Life is not dialectics.’54” And, indeed, it does say that. How do I respond to such an objection? The answer is that Emerson says “Life is not dialectics” dialectically. He is saying this, specifically, to himself. He has just been complaining about how everything that we think is stable, reliable, is what it is turns out to be illusory. Nothing is stable or reliable or is what it is. We want it things to be still, “Pero si muove,”55 says Emerson quoting Galileo responding himself to himself and to his response to the Inquisition. Emerson is ­reprimanding himself for his own querulous tone. The fuller context for “Life is not dialectics” is this: But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism…Objections and criticism we have had our fill of. There are objections to every course of life and action, and the practical wisdom infers an indifferency, from the omnipotence of objection.56

It is a sure sign that it is a passing mood when Emerson says, “What help from thought?” He is, in short, enacting what he is talking about that everything is dialectics. Which is not to say that he does not also believe it. I, too, sometimes, find myself sick of objections, sick, even, of myself, thinking all of the time, criticizing all of the time. Enough of that! But then to criticize my own thinking is thinking, just in a different mood. Emerson does not just write about different moods, he enacts his different moods in his writing.

 Emerson, Essays, 478.  Ibid., 476. 56  Ibid., 478. 54 55

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Real Ideas, the Kafkaesque, and Resistentialism To pursue this Peircean distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘existent,’ where, while both are given to us in signs, the real is more on the order of an idea and the existent is more on the order of a thing, although I believe the polarities of idea and thing are a sorites with a penumbral area between them. I am claiming that for Emerson Nature is real, which is to say, it functions like an idea. Nature is real, it does not exist, but has the properties of the real. The primary property of the real, of an idea, is growth. In “The Law of Mind,” a title Peirce almost certainly got from Emerson’s lectures on “The Natural History of the Intellect,” Peirce lays out some of the principle properties of ideas: Three elements go to make up an idea. The first is its intrinsic quality as a feeling. The second is the energy with which it affects other ideas, an energy which is infinite in the here-and-nowness of immediate sensation, finite and relative in the recency of the past. The third element is the tendency of an idea to bring other ideas with it.57

I want to say something about each of these elements. First, that an idea has an intrinsic “feeling” I read that it is associated with something like a “mood.” “We think by feeling,” says the poet, and I think that, that is a version of what Peirce is saying here. That is the brilliance of Cavell’s calling Emerson “a philosopher of moods.” Emerson is exquisitely attuned to different moods, moods as precisely modes of thinking. Second, the “energy” of an idea, later he will refer to it as the “insistency of an idea,” is, it seems to me, to some degree determined by the minds available to receive it. It was Cavell’s complaint that he did not feel like his contemporary philosophical colleagues were sufficiently receptive to the insistency of Emerson’s ideas. Finally, I take “the tendency of an idea to bring other ideas with it” to refer to two different aspects of an idea. The first is that an idea is, has, develops, a ‘personality,’ a “coördination of ideas,” and second, that the upshot of an idea is futural, where it is going. Peirce says, “As an idea spreads, its power of affecting other ideas gets rapidly reduced; but its intrinsic quality remains nearly unchanged.” That’s what ideas do, they spread. Like the expanding waves from the leap of a frog into still water, the influence of an idea will spread out to affect other  Peirce, CW, 6.135.

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ideas, more and more ideas, and as they spread the influence reduces, but the intrinsic quality maintains its integrity. Finally, the most radical idea of all, in my opinion, is what Peirce has to say about future ideas, the influence of future ideas on present ideas: …consider the insistency of an idea. The insistency of a past idea with reference to the present is a quantity which is less the further back that past idea is, and rises to infinity as the past idea is brought up into coincidence with the present. Here we must make one of those inductive applications of the law of continuity which have produced such great results in all the positive sciences. We must extend the law of insistency into the future. Plainly, the insistency of a future idea with reference to the present is a quantity affected by the minus sign; for it is the present that affects the future, if there be any affect, not the future that affects the present. Accordingly, the curve of insistency is a sort of equilateral hyperbola.

Peirce then supplies this diagram:

Of the curve Peirce says,

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This curve says that the feeling which has not yet emerged into immediate consciousness is already affectible and already affected. In fact, this is habit, by virtue of which an idea is brought up into present consciousness by a bond that has already been established between it and another idea while it was still in futuro.58

Peirce seems to be saying here that we can be affected in the present by an idea from the future, but, paradoxically, by a “quantity affected by the minus sign.” What I take Peirce to be describing here is a kind of conceptual niche, a slight vacuum in the landscape of ideas that will call forth the new idea, the next, idea. The negative insistency of the future idea is the result of habits of thought in an individual already established. The scientist is looking for a scientific explanation. The poet a poetical formulation. The philosopher a philosophical theory, and those are the sorts of ideas that will emerge. “Diverticula…appear,” ideas emerge. That is the natural history of the intellect that Emerson is describing and enacting in his writing. I would like to explore this idea of an idea with a particular idea, the idea of the Kafkaesque. I will begin somewhat disingenuously in order to make a point, but end, I hope, with something genuine. Jorge Luis Borges, in his short essay “Kafka and His Precursors,” argues that every great writer creates his or her own precursors.59 Before Kafka no one was Kafkaesque. After Kafka there are a number of artists who were writing prior to Kafka who could be described as Kafkaesque. Before Kafka, there may have been no description of these various writers that would have logically identified them as belonging to a single group or defined them all under a single description or identified them as members of the same class, but after Kafka, Kafkaesque becomes, to those who know Kafka and the work of these various writers, a relatively easy description at which to arrive. This class, the class of writers who wrote prior to Kafka yet are Kafkaesque, I want to say, is a natural or a real class. By that I mean that there really is something that links these various writers, something in their style of writing and in the content of their writing, something in their worldview, perhaps, Borges calls it “his voice,” or “his habits,”60 a very  Ibid., 6.14.  Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions Paperback, 1964), 199-201. 60  Jorge Luis Borges, “Kafka and His Precursors” in Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fiction edited by Eliot Weinberger, translated by Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 363. 58 59

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Peircean identification, that really is shared and that really does link them. This linking feature, the intensional criterion, or criteria, of this class, has been retrospectively discovered, could only have been, in a fairly obvious sense, retrospectively discovered, after the writings of Kafka appeared, but, in some sense, was, or were, always there. That makes the class ‘Kafkaesque’ more of a discovery than a creation. It is not just that someone has come along and imposed this structure on reality, the structure was already there in reality, but it took Kafka, and then some avid reader, like Borges, to recognize a group of precursors to Kafka as, in fact, Kafkaesque. Once this natural class is discovered it is relatively easy for other people to learn to see it too and to expand on the extension of the class as well as to elaborate on the intension of the class. Perhaps there are other precursors, or even, of course, subsequent writers who can be described as Kafkaesque that people had not generally recognized as Kafkaesque, but with this new reader’s/writer’s insights they can now quite clearly see, there is some of the weirdly acute alienation of Gregor Samsa in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, say. Of course, if this really is a natural, or real, class, I could be wrong about that. Borges’ own identification of examples of the pre-Kafka Kafkaesque initially struck me, interestingly enough, as not very Kafkaesque. He claims “Zeno’s paradox against motion” as an example of the Kafkaesque, and Han Yu writing about Chinese unicorns, and some parables of Kierkegaard are what got him thinking about the Kafkaesque. None of these struck me as remotely Kafkaesque. And then, and then the idea began to work its way into my thinking. Yes, there is something, some combination of the “Penal Colony” and “The Metamorphosis” and The Castle and The Trial in the strange discovery of one’s own ultimate de facto immobility that is the outcome of Zeno’s paradoxes against motion. There is something in the not-quite-classifiable, never-quite-experienced unicorn that has vestiges of the experience of the Absolute, the unsymbolized yet present that hovers throughout the works of Kafka. The Kierkegaard parable of the counterfeiter, “a counterfeiter who, under constant surveillance, examines Bank of England notes; in the same way, God could be suspicious of Kierkegaard and yet entrust him with a mission precisely because He knew he was accustomed to evil,”61 with the double “He” and “he” limns the Absolute and our perpetual, inescapable guilt in regard to it that is pure Kafka.  Ibid., 364.

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What is disingenuous in my discussion of the Kafkaesque is the metaphysical tone of it. As if the Kafkaesque were a real thing, as if it existed, as if there were a metaphysical truth to it. It is real, but does not exist. It is just a coördination of ideas, and so, it has a personality, one can be right or wrong in assessing a personality, but it does not exist. It is given in signs. Such is Emerson’s Nature. People read Emerson as a Transcendentalist and Transcendentalists as metaphysical realists, but that is not what Emerson is. The thing that is ‘real’ is intangible, invisible, and is not very much like what we ordinarily think of as a thing at all. It is more of a mental thing than a physical thing. It will also change, or even grow, to use a much more organic metaphor. It is relational and emergent rather than autonomous and independent, although, in some sense, it is also autonomous and independent. It is a real class, so it must be autonomous and independent as a class. It takes a lot of cultural training in order to be able to perceive it. There may be some who, even with a sufficient amount of cultural training, cannot see it. They might be described as Kafkaesque-­ blind, in the mode of describing some people as irony-blind. Others may think they see it and yet are mistaken. What they think is Kafkaesque is really Dantean, and they make that mistake consistently. They might be trained to recognize the genuinely Kafkaesque, just as someone who systematically uses the word “metonymy” when they mean “synecdoche” might be trained to use those words correctly. Three more things to say about an idea like the Kafkaesque. First, ideas spread, which is another way of saying that they grow. They get larger and connected to other ideas. Second, there is a “crack” in every idea that is represented in Peirce’s diagram by the line of positive insistency and negative insistency that distinguishes the past from the future. That line marks the incipient drawing of a new circle. It marks the evolution of a new idea, or rather, a new inflected personality of old ideas in a new coördination of ideas. That is effectively a new idea, one larger than the previous idea. Finally, the real upshot of ideas is not the past, although ideas from the past are essential to ideas of the future, it is the future. Ideas are essentially and inherently futural. Peirce puts it “The future is suggested by, or rather is influenced by the suggestions of, the past.”62 Emerson says, “Every intellection is mainly prospective. Its present value is its least.”63  Peirce, CW, 6.142.  Emerson, Essays, 421.

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All of which brings me to ‘resistentialism.’ There is a dark joke of a philosophy called “resistentialism,” which is a combination of “resistance” and “existentialism.” It is meant to account for the way things seem be against us. Its rallying cry is “Les choses sont contre nous.” The things are against us! Its (pretend) founder, a French man by the name of Pierre-­ Marie Ventre, was killed when he stepped on his garden rake.64 It is a fairly dyspeptic philosophy (“Ventre” refers to the stomach or bowels) that sees the human condition as one that is surrounded by enemies, namely, things. Interestingly, the starting place of this philosophy is quite Emersonian and Peircean. That is, it attributes mind and intentions to things. It is not, ultimately, Emersonian or Peircean since the mind it posits for things is not a mind of love, which is what Emerson and Peirce say characterizes the mind of the world and the mind of individual things (mostly), but hate and resentment. The irony to this, it seems to me, is that, of course, when things with personalities are mistreated, are, especially, treated as though they did not have a mind, then tend to be a bit, well, disagreeable. It is not so much that Emerson would say that Resistentialism is false, so much as that it will certainly be true for the scientific materialist, what he calls the “so-called scientists,” that see all matter in the world, except humans, as inanimate, dead, static, stuff. Of course things in the world will not be happy about that. That is not the end of the matter, however. If one adopts a more Emersonian and Peircean approach to the things of the world. If one approaches everything as though it had a personality, which means that one would approach things in the way one would approach a person, at least as one would in one’s best moments, then things, presumably, would respond in quite a different way. People certainly do fetishize and dehumanize and fail to see the personality of other people, but in our best moments, we assume a personality and then act as though it will be revealed to us in time. This means treating the other with a certain amount of respect, especially respecting the traits of personality that emerge as we interact with them. The response predicted by both Emerson and Peirce is that a person or a thing (which are really the same sorts of things) treated in such a way will respond reciprocally, hence respectfully and cooperatively.

64  This is actually a made-up satire philosophy created by Paul Jennings in 1948 and revived recently by Charles Harrington Elster in article in the New York Times Magazine of September 21, 2003.

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The suggestion, then, is that Resistentialism is not as ridiculous as it at first appears to be. We really do have problems with things because we really do not pay very much attention to the personalities of the things we work with. By “personality” I mean the dispositions of a thing, the habitual way of responding to specific circumstances that characterize a particular thing. To understand the personality of a thing is to understand what it will do, under different and varying circumstances. Hence this knowledge of a thing’s personality is, to use Emerson’s word, prospective. In a world in which we are becoming more and more dependent on things, becoming more and more like cyborgs ourselves, and in a world that is appearing more and more fragile because of human abuses, the Emersonian and Peircean models of pervasive mind seem less crazy than essential. There is an answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx, which is the riddle of what it is that is a human, and the answer is that to be human is to be constantly drawn to a self-transcendence that has the very specific logical structure of moving from Firstness to Thirdness via Secondness. This is a process of growth. It is a process of drawing ever larger circles in the world. It is part of the discovery of this trajectory of growth that it is not ours alone, but belongs to all things in the world. Insofar as we cannot ‘see’ this, insofar as we cannot acknowledge this, we will find ourselves in a world that is fundamentally hostile to our willful ways. Insofar as we can see this and live this and learn to respect all of the personalities that surround us in the world, and the personality of the world itself, there is the possibility of a joyful onward movement, a movement that can be characterized by larger and larger emergent patterns of relationships of things drawn to each other under a particular idea, which in its largest manifestation, its largest coördination of ideas, is the idea of Nature. “All things have two handles,” says Emerson, “beware of the wrong one.”65

 Emerson, Essays, 54.

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CHAPTER 7

Emerson and Paz: Evolutionary Existentialism

“Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much.” —Emerson, “Nominalist and Realist” “Self-discovery is above all the discovery that we are alone…” —Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude

There is a kind of evolutionary existentialism that appears in the work of Emerson and Octavio Paz which emerges from a dialectic between the ideas of the particular and the general that simultaneously acknowledges a reason for hope and for despair. As Emerson says, “every man is wanted,” there is reason for hope, and “no man is wanted much,” there is not much hope, and at the end of hope, despair. A similar dialectic is articulated by Paz. He calls it the “dialectic of solitude,” which is a dialectic of our utter aloneness, despair, and, via myth and fiesta, our communion, hope. I shall discuss the evolutionary, by which I mean, the naturalized, origins of this dialectic in connection with Emerson and Darwinian evolution, and then pick up the metaphor of the labyrinth from Paz. I will consider the contemporary labyrinth in which we are entrapped, and use Emerson and Paz to show us the way out. A question that the line from Emerson raises is “Wanted by whom?” The paragraph in which this line occurs begins, “For nature, who abhors

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Gilmore, Emerson as Philosopher, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32546-5_7

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mannerism, has set her heart on breaking up all styles and tricks….”1 For that matter, the essay as a whole begins, “I cannot often enough say, that a man is only a relative and representative nature.”2 The answer to the question, “Wanted by whom?” is “Nature,” every man is wanted by nature, but not wanted much by nature. There is here a theory of nature, a theory of what a human being is, an ethics, an epistemology, an ontology, and a metaphysics. The theory of nature is that nature is, much like Emerson himself, an essayist, an experimenter. “Man” is a metonymy, or, more specifically, a synecdoche, a part for the whole, for every living thing in nature, and, for that matter, for nature itself. Man is representative of nature, and vice versa. Man is a microcosm that recapitulates the macrocosm, as all living things are and do. This idea of nature is, it seems to me, quite Darwinian. Each living thing is representative of a species, and each species representative of a genus, and each genus representative of a family, all the way up to kingdoms, and all six known kingdoms representative of life in the world as we know it. That is the scientific classification of living things. To say that Emerson is Darwinian is to say that Emerson’s sense of nature is evolutionary. He sees nature as an ongoing process of experimentation in forms, “forms most beautiful,” in Darwin’s own quite poetic phrase.3 When Emerson has his life transforming moment in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, when he suddenly recognizes that, underneath the great variety of outer appearances in nature, there are extremely similar internal structures, and declares in his journal, “I will be a naturalist”4 I take his expression to have two distinct, yet simultaneous, meanings. The first meaning of “I will be a naturalist” is that he will devote himself to the study of nature, an empirical study of nature, much like a scientist does. The second meaning is more subtle and perhaps not fully appreciated even by Emerson as he announces it, but becomes, in the unfolding of his life, his ultimate life commitment: to be a naturalist is to be at one with nature, to be natural, to make oneself (ironically) as much like nature as possible. The irony is, how does one make oneself what one already is? Or, in the  Ibid., 583.  Ibid., 575. 3  Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection Or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life (New York: The Modern Library, 1998), 649. 4  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, edited by Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1982), 111. 1 2

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words of Emerson’s greatest interpreter and acolyte, Nietzsche, it is the paradox in the problem of how “one becomes what one is.”5 Every individual living thing is wanted, and not wanted much: that is the essence of Nature. Every living thing is wanted as a kind of experiment in the kind of forms life can take. Each living thing has a kind of twin teleology: to represent its species, as it has manifested itself up to and including the instantiation of the species that this new individual living thing represents, and to represent a new possible future for the species, a new way of being this kind of thing that each new, unique individual also represents. This is also a single teleology. What is two becomes one: this cat has as its biological imperative, to be the best cat it can be, and in doing that, it realizes its own unique cat potential which becomes an influence on what future cats will be. The two teleologies become one teleology of constant experimentation. It is, as Peirce calls it, a “developmental teleology.”6 Its end is to constantly develop, grow, change. Nor does this “end,” this telos, preclude a total end, as in, most commonly, death, but also extinction. Every living thing, every living species, is wanted, but not wanted much. The ethic here is very Emersonian: realize your own potential, find your own way, be true to yourself, which Emerson calls “self-reliance.” What is most wanted of each of us is that we each find our own way and in doing so we contribute to the greater possibility of what it means to be human. The epistemology is also clear. What is there to know? What there is to know is what things are, what they can become, and what they are becoming. This is an ontology and a metaphysics. The ontology is that everything is becoming, Heraclitus is a favorite pre-Socratic of Emerson’s and named in “Nominalist and Realist.” But what things become have names, and the names stand for general concepts, and the general concepts are as real in nature as the individual things are, so that we are all, as Emerson argues in “Nominalist and Realist,” nominalists and realists. “Wanted” is a bit overly anthropomorphic. We think, as Emerson repeatedly insists, and as I repeatedly insist, by analogies: as he says in Nature “man is an analogist,” and again in “Imagination and Intellect,” “All thinking is analogizing.” I take “wanted” to be an analogy, something along the lines of what wanting is for us, producing life is for nature. 5  Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Translated by R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1979). The line is from the subtitle of the book. 6  Peirce, CW, 6.157.

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Who knows why life is produced in nature, what random contingencies led to this, but once life is here, it shows definite tendencies, specifically, to reproduce itself, to grow itself, to be a unique and particular self, and to die. The analogizing trope that Emerson prefers is the trope of metonymy. Consider the opening metonymy of the essay “Nominalist and Realist,” “man is only a relative and representative nature.” Man, a part, represents the whole, nature. The particular, in this case, one particular species, stands in for all species, for life in general. Of course, that particular is also a general, but then, every particular is also a general. A particular person is a general composed of many particulars, organs, bacteria, that get generalized into this particular person. Every particular name names a particular entity that is also a general. There is no thinking that is not simultaneously nominalistic and realistic, of particulars and generals. Our thinking recapitulates nature. Here is Darwin on nature: In looking at Nature, it is most necessary to keep the forgoing considerations always in mind—never forget that every single organic being may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers; that each lives by a struggle at some period of its life; that heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or old, during each generation or at recurrent intervals. Lighten the check, mitigate the destruction ever so little, and the number of the species will almost instantaneously increase to any amount.7

The tendency of nature to try out new forms Darwin refers to as “sporting.” Here is his description of “sporting plants”: “‘sporting plant,’ as they are called by gardeners;—that is, of plants which have suddenly produced a single bud with a new and sometimes widely different character from that of other buds on the same plant.”8 Here is Emerson on the contest that is life: “For though gamesters say, that the cards beat all players, though they were never so skillful, yet in the contest we are now considering, the players are also the game, and share the power of the cards.”9 ‘Sporting,’ ‘gaming,’ these are metaphors, or metonymies, for the way life, as it were, invites experimentation and, at the same time, because of the very proliferation of the games and sports, in the end ends all of the  Darwin, Origin, 94.  Ibid., 28 9  Emerson, Essays, 583. 7 8

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sports and games, like all discussions, in “the mud-flat detritus of death.” Here is Emerson on this natural cycle: The old forest is decomposed for the composition of new forest. The old animals have given their bodies to the earth to furnish through chemistry the forming race, and every individual is only a momentary fixation of what was yesterday another’s, is today his, and will belong to a third tomorrow. So it is in thought….10

Darwin calls his theory of evolution, or, at least one part of it, “natural selection.” “Selection” is a teleological word. It suggests a goal or an end, a telos, to be achieved by the selection. As just an aside, Terrence Deacon, in his book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, quotes the scientist J.  B. S.  Haldane saying, “Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public.”11 Certainly Darwin has no intention of attributing anything like an Aristotelian teleology to the processes of evolution, but neither, it seems to me, would Emerson. If that is the case, what kind of teleology might we attribute to nature? I have already alluded to Peirce’s idea of a “developmental teleology.” Jacob’s description of the evolution of a lung is precisely an example of such a developmental teleology. What ‘calls forth,’ as it were, to use teleological language, what “selects,” is something like the combination of an environmental niche, power in a stagnant pool goes to the fish with the wrinkliest esophagus, and a kind of natural “pressure.” The pressure is manifested in the pressure to reproduce, the sex drive. This pressure has, again, as it were, twin teleological goals, to reproduce the same and to reproduce something quite particular, unique and different. The same is the general, this species of fish; the particular is this particular example of this species of fish, and in this particular case, this particular individual of this species of fish that happens to have a wrinkly esophagus. All of which is to say that nature itself is nominalist and realist. In nature this is not an argument but an ongoing process. It is the process of nature itself. Nature, what we call nature, is evolution, and evolution is the interplay of general forms and individual instances of those forms. Instantiations  Emerson, Complete Writings, 788.  Terrence W. Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012), 107. 10 11

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in the particular get generalized in the species via natural selection and sexual selection. Responses by the particular individual to its environment and to other members of the species result in new forms that the species will take. There is a kind of two-ness to nature that is also a unity. Emerson repeatedly refers to nature and to us in terms of this two-ness that is also a one-ness in “Nominalist and Realist.” He says, for example, “We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of faculties, the particular and the catholic”; “…nature is one thing and the other thing, in the same moment”; and finally, as a kind of summary: All the universe over, there is but one thing, this old Two-Face, creator-­ creature, mind-matter, right-wrong, of which any proposition may be affirmed or denied. Very fitly, therefore, I assert, that every man is a partialist, that nature secures him as an instrument by self-conceit,…and now I add, that every man is a universalist also, and, as our earth, whilst it spins on its own axis, spins all the time around the sun through the celestial spaces, so the least of its rational children, the most dedicated to his private affair, works out, though as it were under a disguise, the universal problem. We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field, goes through every point in pumpkin history.12

There is a two-ness that is also a one-ness in everything from a person to a pumpkin. “Under a disguise” because what looks like the individual working for his own self-interest is really the universal game, the species, nature, playing itself out. We have something within us that is more than ourselves, it is nature, it is our species-self that has its own universal agenda than transcends our particular individual desires. This is the nature of evolution, working out the general via the particular. This is the internal dialectic that we all experience, we are all fundamentally unique, and therefore alone, and we are all a part of something larger that we cannot really understand, with a future we cannot really see, but that unites us in one common endeavor. Octavio Paz finds a particular example of the experience of this dialectic in love: Love is one of the clearest examples of that double instinct which causes us to dig deeper into our own selves and, at the same time, to emerge from  Emerson, Essays, 586.

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ourselves and to realize ourselves in another: death and re-creation, solitude and communion. But it is not the only one. In the life of every man there are periods that are both departures and reunions, separations and reconciliations. Each of these phases is an attempt to transcend our solitude, and is followed by an immersion in strange environments.13

The metaphor that Paz uses for these “strange environments” in which we occasionally wake to find ourselves immersed is the labyrinth. The dialectic is continual and ongoing. Solitude is terrifying, so we seek reassurance in a group; in a group we find ourselves alienated from ourselves, and must seek our authentic self in the labyrinth of solitude. Paz says, “solitude is a dangerous and terrifying condition…In archaic societies, complex and rigid systems of prohibitions, rules and rituals protects the individual from solitude.”14 These rules protect the individual from solitude and deny the individual their individuality. Solitude is the problem and the solution: “The dual significance of solitude—a break with one world and an attempt to create another—can be seen in our conception of heroes, saints and redeemers. Myth, biography, history and poetry describe a period of withdrawal and solitude…preceding a return to the world of action.”15 Paz speaks of the “myth of the labyrinth”: “The myth of the labyrinth pertains to this set of beliefs. Several related ideas make the labyrinth one of the most fertile and meaningful mythical symbols: the talisman or other object, capable of restoring health or freedom to the people, at the center of a sacred area….”16 The talisman is the myth, it is the narrative aimed at a future that makes the future livable. Paz’s diagnosis of our sickness is that we have “rationalized the myths,” he refers to the “sterility of the bourgeois world” and says, “it will end in suicide or a new form of creative participation.”17 What is needed are new myths and, as he says, fiestas: Myths and fiestas, whether secular or religious, permit man to emerge from his solitude and become one with creation. Therefore myth—disguised,

13  Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, translated by Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, and Rachel Philips Belash (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 202. 14  Ibid., 205. 15  Ibid., 204-5 16  Ibid., 208. 17  Ibid., 212.

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obscure, hidden—reappears in almost all our acts and intervenes decisively in our history: it opens the doors of communion.18

The myths are “disguised,” once again, because we do not see them as myths. We think we are just living our lives and do not recognize the mythic narrative, the universal narrative, the dialectic of universal and particular that provides the narrative that is the ultimate determiner of the meaning of our lives. What is needed is not a nostalgic return to some previous condition, like making America great again, but a reconceptualization of the future, a new myth of a new way of being human that frees us from bourgeois sterility and the reductive rationalizations of proliferating technologies. We must make new essays, new experiments in thought, go into the labyrinth of our individual solitude in search of our own idea of a better future in order to make that future, or even a future at all, possible. Paz ends his book with the following slightly inscrutable lines. I take it that ‘eyes open’ signifies the belief that one sees when one does not, and eyes closed to be one’s willing immersion in the labyrinth of solitude from whence will come one’s true calling. Here is how Paz concludes The Labyrinth of Solitude: Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-­ awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed.19

Dialectics of Waking and Sleeping: Labyrinths and Fiestas; Silence and Language “…but the rest of men fail to notice what they do after they wake up just as they forget what they do when asleep.”20 —Heraclitus “Poetry…is simply poetry of solitude or of communion.”21  Ibid., 211.  Ibid., 212. 20  Kirk and Raven, Presocratic, 187. 21  An address delivered by Octavio Paz in 1942 quoted by Kosrof Chantikian in “The Poetry and Thought of Octavio Paz: An Introduction,” in Octavio Paz: Modern Critical Views edited by Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2002), 9. 18 19

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—Octavio Paz “All men have some access to primary truth….We may owe to dreams some light on the fountain of this skill; for as soon as we let our will go and let the unconscious states ensue, see what cunning draughtsmen we are!”22 —Emerson, “Intellect”

Heraclitus sets up a relational contrast between waking and sleeping meant to capture the contrast between the wise few and the foolish many. The few wise are to the foolish many like the awake among the asleep. Paz both upholds the Heraclitan formulation and, dialectically, undoes it. Paz says, “Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake,” but, upholding the Heraclitan wisdom, really “we are dreaming with our eyes open,” that is, we are asleep. But then he goes, I will say, fiesta on that simply dichotomy. This dreaming with our eyes open leads us “into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.” This recalls for me, somewhat, but finally perhaps not, ironically, Goya’s famous drawing (aquatint) “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” The irony would come from the fact that Paz says that “the dreams of reason are intolerable,” whereas Goya seems to be saying that it is precisely when reason sleeps that the monsters emerge. Perhaps it is not even an irony but just a disagreement about what happens when reason sleeps. Things, however, get immediately, dialectically, complicated. First in Paz, but also in Goya. Paz says that “the dreams of reason are intolerable,” but then adds, “And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed.” Dreaming now, it is suggested, is not simply the problem but may also be the way out of the problem. This would seem to invert Heraclitus’ suggestion that being awake was good and dreaming bad, so that, somewhat weirdly, in Paz’s new formulation, the asleep dreamers are to the awake rational people, like awake people among dreamers. This is confusing and it is hard to make sense of it. Is it nonsensical? Goya, at first compounding the problem may help make sense of it. First of all, the actual title of Goya’s painting in Spanish is El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. “Sueño” can be translated as “sleep” or as “dream.” The figure in the drawing is clearly sleeping and dreaming. So it is not clear if the drawing is depicting the “sleep” of reason or the “dream” of reason, which would seem to be two very different, even opposite,  Emerson, Complete Writings, 226.

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things. The drawing is, in short, dialectical. There is a crack in it, and that crack is the same crack that appears in Paz’s description that “the dreams of reason are intolerable” and then his immediate call to return to dreaming. Goya helps us out. He says, “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders.”23 I very much appreciate the clarification. I am glad he said it so clearly, but, I want to say, Goya’s statement is as banal as it is clear. It is, I suspect, a sop for Cerebus, a concession to the foolish many (among whom we all sometimes belong) who without the clarification, might think he was advocating mindless irrationalism. What the banal statement, clear and concise, leaves out is the drama of his drawing El sueño de la razón…. Paz’s own formulation is, in its own way, just as dramatic, and, I believe intentionally recapitulating the drama of Goya’s drawing. That is, the way out of the labyrinth of solitude that has become “torture chambers…endlessly repeated” is through the labyrinth of solitude. As Frost has a character say in “A Servant to Servants,” “I can see no way out but through—.”24 We, modern humans, modern people, find ourselves stuck in a labyrinth of “torture chambers,” now, I want to say, as people always want to say, more than ever. But the metaphor of the labyrinth is a metaphor of a passageway. There is a way in and a way out. There is an outside to the labyrinth of solitude and that outside Paz associates with the Mexican ‘fiesta.’ I am at once horrified by it and seduced by it. I can find nothing quite like Paz’s ‘fiesta’ in Emerson. There is a kind of private fiesta for Emerson in the communion with Nature, in the experience of the ecstasy of receptive perception and receptive creation, but no communal ecstasy that Paz describes as the Mexican fiesta. It is a profound idea, the Mexican fiesta. It is an idea that is quite foreign to me, although I have participated in fiestas in Spain, and they were every much as chaotic, crazy, space and time transformed as Paz describes the Mexican fiesta. I was in it but did not understand it. But the illness that Paz diagnoses in us, the illness of modernity and of postmodernity, of hyperrationality and the loss of 23  “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders.” Khan Academy https://www. khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/romanticism/romanticism-in-spain/a/ goya-the-sleep-of-reason-produces-monsters 24  Frost, Collected Poems, 66.

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connection with some more primordial as well as communal self was diagnosed by Emerson. In the section “Prospects” in Nature Emerson says, “The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in pieces, is, because man is disunited with himself.”25 In “The American Scholar” Emerson says, “The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man…Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things.”26 It is precisely such illnesses that Paz sees the Mexican fiesta as solving. I, personally, cannot see going the way of the Mexican fiesta, but it does seem to solve the illnesses that both Emerson and Paz diagnose us as sick with. After discussing the Mexican fiesta I will consider whether there is some version of that, that can be construed in the writings of Emerson. Paz says, “The fiesta is by nature sacred, literally or figuratively, and above all it is the advent of the unusual.”27 It is that feature of the usual that makes possible the “advent of the unusual” which is also the advent of the sacred, a hierophany, which I have referred to as a “crack” in reality, in nature, in our ideas of reality or nature and which I will be calling also a “chiasmus,” a “khôra,” and a “schemata.” It is what invites, calls forth, dialectic, which is just another word for thinking. Paz associates fiesta with “revolt” and says, “The fiesta is a revolution in the most literal sense of the word.”28 As Paz says, In certain fiestas the very notion of order disappears. Chaos comes back and license rules. Anything is permitted: the customary hierarchies vanish, along with all social, sex, caste, and trade distinctions. Men disguise themselves as women, gentlemen as slaves, the poor as rich. The army, the clergy, and the law are ridiculed. Obligatory sacrilege, ritual profanation is committed.29

It is a kind of Nietzschean transvaluation of all values that Paz is describing here. He says, “everything takes place as if it were not so, as if it were a dream,” which seems to be the sleep of reason that is also at the same time the dream of reason.  Emerson, Essays, 47.  Ibid., 54. 27  Paz, Labyrinth, 50. 28  Ibid., 51. 29  Ibid. 25 26

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Dreams are also nightmares, to which Paz refers and Goya shows us. The fiesta is not uncomplicated in the same way. It is joyful, yes, but also sorrowful, according to Paz: But the Mexican fiesta is not merely a return to an original state of formless and normless liberty: the Mexican is not seeking to return, but to escape from himself, to exceed himself. Our fiestas are explosions. Life and death, joy and sorrow, music and mere noise are united, not to re-create or recognize themselves, but to swallow each other up. There is nothing so joyous as a Mexican fiesta, but there is also nothing so sorrowful. Fiesta night is a night of mourning.30

A similar emotional dialectic appears in Emerson’s essays. In “Intellect” he speaks of the “rapture” of thought and of the thoughts themselves as “ecstasies.” He says, “It is called Truth. But the moment we cease to report and attempt to correct and contrive, it is not truth.”31 So that “Every man beholds his condition with a degree of melancholy.”32 In “Circles” Emerson says, “Truth is sad” and describes the emotional dialectic, “I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.”33 Transcendence, the escape from the self, has its ups and downs. Paz tells a wonderful story about a conversation he has with the mayor of a very small and very poor village. He asks the mayor what the income of the village is and the mayor says: “‘About 3,000 pesos a year. We are very poor. But the Governor and the Federal Government always help us to meet our expenses.’ ‘And how are the 3,000 pesos spent?’ ‘Mostly on fiestas, señor. We are a small village, but we have two patron saints.’”34 That makes me laugh every time I read it. They are a poor village in terms of pesos, but a very rich village in terms of patron saints. Two are a lot of patron saints to have to take care of, to have to honor with the appropriate fiestas.

Beauvoir talks about “the trick of ‘enlightened’ capitalism.” She says that the proletarian is no more moral than anyone else, but is especially susceptible to the trick of enlightened capital which “is to make him forget  Ibid., 53.  Emerson, Essays, 419. 32  Ibid., 418. 33  Ibid., 406. 34  Octavio Paz, Labyrinth, 48. 30 31

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about his concern with genuine justification” and “to absorb his transcendence” with, as she also amusingly says, “the trap of sports, ‘gadgets,’ autos, and frigidaires.”35 It is not so much that capitalism is inherently evil, as I read Beauvoir here, but that it does try to trick us into thinking that the only values that there are, are capitalist values. It distracts us from discovering alternative values by dangling capitalist values before our eyes. But if the only values are money values then there is no value. What we need are some alternate values. Paz compares the people involved in a fiesta with people in the United States or France at some public celebration: The modern masses are agglomerations of solitary individuals. On great occasions in Paris or New York, when the populace gathers in the squares or stadiums, the absence of people, in the sense of a people, is remarkable: there are couples and small groups, but they never form a living community in which the individual is at once dissolved and redeemed.36

The modern masses are trapped in labyrinths of solitude, and we feel it. Capitalism does isolate. It monetizes everything, including our relations with each other. The mayor and his small poor village are a part of the capitalist economy of Mexico, but the value of money, and money is valuable to them, is to use it in the service of a higher value, honoring their patron saints. That is what we need today, a value, or values, that are higher than the values of capitalism, of mere money. Jason Wilson helps me understand Paz’s conception of the fiesta to some degree when he says, “The notion of fiesta spills into that of the poem” and he quotes Paz, “‘el poema es fiesta.’”37 The poem is a fiesta in miniature, and an actual Mexican fiesta is a poem communally performed and experienced. Some poems are about solitude and describe the experience of being within the labyrinth. Some poems are about communion, community, what is outside the labyrinth, fiesta. Emerson’s essays are both small fiestas, like a poem is or can be, but they also call for communion, community, a community of American scholars, a community of the self-­ reliant, a community of naturalists. The notion of community is what we are lacking today. It is what so fascinates me about Paz’s description of the  Beauvoir, Ethics, 87-8.  Paz, Labyrinth, 48 37  Octavio Paz, quoted by Jason Wilson, “Mentalist Poetics, the Quest, ‘Fiesta’ and Other Motifs” in Bloom, Octavio Paz, 53. 35 36

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Mexican fiesta. It involves a sense of higher values to which we are committed, not individually, but communally. Emerson sees the problem and offers us some higher values that could lead to more of a sense of community. In Nature he compares property to “snow,” and at the end of “Napoleon; Or, The Man of the World” he says: As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.38

Emerson finds his version of a fiesta in two places, in Nature and in his thoughts when he is really thinking. Susan Dunston in her book Emerson and Environmental Ethics describes what she calls “environmental literacy” as “awareness, appreciation, and informed participation in a living, life-sustaining, and dynamic composition.”39 She associates the fostering of such literacy with Emerson. She quotes Julene Bair, “‘Our sense of beauty is a survival instinct, telling us that a place can sustain us for generations to come’” and associates this response to natural beauty with not just sustainability but also with romanticism. “Beauty for the romantics generally, and Emerson particularly, was vital to healthy physical being and conduct of life.”40 What I am trying to suggest here is that nature, especially nature as beautiful, can be an “advent of the unusual,” but more specifically, in the notion of environmental literacy, a shared, communal advent, something like a fiesta. The romantics, I believe, experienced nature as something like a fiesta. “Something like” is pretty far from the chaos of the Mexican fiesta, I acknowledge, but certainly for Emerson it had the character of the ecstatic. “The American Scholar” can be read as a celebration of the fiesta of thought. What so strikes me about the Mexican fiesta is the way it creates, as Paz says, “a people.” Everyone in the mayor’s poor village is committed to the same project of honoring their saints with the appropriate fiestas.  Emerson, Essays, 745.  Susan L.  Dunston, Emerson and Environmental Ethics (New York: Lexington Books, 2018), 9. 40  Ibid., 32. The reference for the Bair quotation is: Julene Bair, The Ogallala Road: A Story of Love, Family, and the Fight To Keep the Great Plains from Running Dry (New York: Penguin Books, 2015), 4. 38 39

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There is a value which transcends money, which, in fact, gives actual value to money, namely, to fiesta. I read Emerson in “The American Scholar” as calling for something similar in thought. “The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them the facts amidst appearances.”41 What are the “facts” we would know? Ecstatic facts: What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat;—show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature…. 42

Here, it seems to me, Emerson is describing the potential of the extraordinary to emerge into the ordinary. He is talking about hierophanies amidst the everyday. He is talking about a kind of transvaluation of all values where the lowest becomes the highest and the highest the lowest. He is describing not quite a Mexican fiesta but a more subdued but nevertheless intense possibility that might be a possibility that we share communally, what he describes at the end of “The American Scholar” “the conversion of the world,”43 and which it is the job of the American scholar to effect (and of “The American Scholar” to effect).

Inspiration as Collaboration as Thinking “…there is a back-stretched connexion, as in the bow and the lyre.”44 —Heraclitus “…all poets have signalized their consciousness of rare moments when they were superior to themselves,—when a light, a freedom, a power came to them which lifted them to performances far better than they could reach at other times….”45 —Emerson, “Inspiration” “…that strange phenomenon that seems to deny us and to deny the foundations of the modern age: there, at the heart of consciousness, in the

 Emerson, Essays, 63.  Ibid., 69. 43  Ibid., 71. 44  Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophy, 193. 45  Emerson, Complete Writings, 810. 41 42

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ego, pillar of the world, the only rock that does not disintegrate, suddenly appears a strange element, one that destroys the identity of consciousness.”46 —Paz, “Inspiration”

Inspiration, which is precisely the potential for the extraordinary to emerge into the ordinary, is a mystery. As Emerson says in his essay “Inspiration,” “Of the modus of inspiration we have no knowledge.”47 Paz, in his chapter on “Inspiration” in his book The Bow and Lyre, describes inspiration as a collaboration: …there is always a fatal and unexpected collaboration. This collaboration can be given with our will or without, but it always assumes the form of an intrusion. The poet’s voice is and is not his own. What is his name, who is it that interrupts my discourse and makes me say things that I did not intend to say?48

“Fatal” I read as having the double meaning of “deadly,” as in the cause of the death of or replacement of my ‘self’ by some Other, and, of “fateful,” as in the creation of my new ‘self.’ The question what is this Other’s name points to the fundamental mystery of inspiration to which Emerson also refers. Emerson, in the continuation of his remark about the mystery of inspiration, refers to inspiration as “enthusiasm,” literally the experience of ‘god within’ and of an “ecstasy,” literally the experience of ‘standing outside oneself.’ I take the question of what is inspiration to have the twin concerns of where does it come from and what is it? Emerson begins his book Nature by identifying what he intends to discuss, Nature, in terms of the “NOT ME”: “Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME…, must be ranked under this name, NATURE.”49 This distinction between the ME and the NOT ME I hear echoed in Paz’s claim that “The poet’s voice is and is not his own.” By the end of Nature, however, Emerson’s radical distinction between the ME and the NOT ME seems to break down. In the final paragraph he says, “What we are, that only can we

46  Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre translated by Ruth L. C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973), 153 47  Emerson, Essays, 810. 48  Paz, Bow and Lyre, 140-41. 49  Emerson, Essays, 8.

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see.”50 Now there seems to be no distinction between the ME and the NOT ME. I am Nature and Nature is me. Or rather, ME is NOT ME and NOT ME is ME, dialectically. To say that the ME is NOT ME and vice versa would seem to be stating a contradiction and, per Aristotle, one cannot sensibly state a contradiction, “tertium non datur,” “no third is given,” but, according to Peirce’s logic, a third is given. There is Thirdness. Emerson describes the experience of inspiration, that, as he says, “all poets” know: …all poets have signalized their consciousness of rare moments when they were superior to themselves—when a light, a freedom, a power came to them which lifted them to performances far better than they could reach at other times; so that a religious poet once told me that he valued his poems, not because they were his, but because they were not. He thought the angels brought them to him.51

We are in the closed circle of our experience. Everything is what it is and we are what we are and there is BEING. And then, and then, in a moment, “a light, a freedom, a power” come. In what was the wall of the circle of our experience, of our world, a door opens. The light comes in. What is this light and from whence does it come? The problem, it seems to me, is a deep one. Paz sees the phenomenon of inspiration as a threat to the whole modern, scientistic, Enlightenment worldview. It begins, for Paz, with Descartes: “Since Descartes, our idea of external reality has been radically transformed…nature has been changed for us into a cluster of objects and relations.”52 Hence: “Thus, a wall has come between our idea of inspiration and our idea of the world. Inspiration has become a problem for us. Its existence denies our most deeply rooted intellectual beliefs.”53 This is part of the postmodern problem we face. A world that has been de-divinitized and disenchanted by a scientistic worldview that leaves the meanings out. And yet, there is inspiration. This is an ancient problem and a recurrent one in the history of philosophy. I will just mention two attempts to take on the problem philosophically. Plato’s Timaeus, once one of Plato’s most read dialogues, now  Ibid., 48.  Emerson, Complete Writings, 810. 52  Paz, Bow and Lyre, 144. 53  Ibid., 145 50 51

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less read, and, to me, one of his strangest, is ostensibly about “the origin of the universe,” as Critias assigns the topic to Timaeus, because he “is our expert in astronomy and has made it his main business to know the nature of the universe.”54 I say “ostensibly” because, although it is certainly about the origin of the universe, I cannot help but read it as also, allegorically, about the origin of thought, which is an undeniable part of the universe. It is, in short, also about inspiration. Plato identifies two figures that I want for a moment to pick up. The first is a description of the universe in terms of a chiasmus based on the figure of the chi, the Greek X. This is how Timaeus describes it: He [the Demiurge] sliced this entire compound in two along its length, joined the two halves together center to center like an X, and bent them back in a circle, attaching each half to itself end to end and to the ends of the other half at the point opposite to the one where they had been joined together. He then included in that motion which revolves in the same place without variation, and began to make the one the outer, and the other the inner circle. And he decreed that the outer movement should be the movement of the Same, while the inner one should be that of the Different.55

Emerson says of Plato, “He domesticates the soul in nature: man is the microcosm. All the circles of the visible heaven represent as many circles in the rational soul.”56 This figure of the chiasmus will come up later, but for now, picking up Emerson’s suggestion, this figure of the universe as comprised of circles in motion, and the circles themselves as circles of the Same and the Different are versions of Emerson’s the ME and the NOT ME. They represent Emerson’s idea of “polarities” and of the “undulation” between polarities. This process is dialectical. As Emerson says in “Plato; Or, the Philosopher,” “there is a science of sciences—I call it Dialectic,—which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true. It rests on the observation of identity and diversity….”57 Which is itself dialectical from the first sentence to the second, where in the first sentence the false and the true are affirmed only to be, in the second sentence, denied, as the truth of identity is undone by the truth of diversity. The

 Plato, Timaeus, 1234, (27a).  Ibid., 1240 (36b-c). 56  Emerson, Essays, 658. 57  Ibid., 645. 54 55

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dialectical movement of the universe is reproduced, recapitulated, within our own minds. So far Plato has presented us with two necessities, the Same and the Different, but they prove insufficient to account for the emergence of being. A third thing, a third kind of thing (triton genos), is required. Plato calls it the khôra. Timaeus says he must start again. The new starting point in my account of the universe needs to be more complex than the earlier one. Then we distinguished two kinds, but now we must specify a third, one of a different sort….What must we suppose it to do and be? This above all: it is a receptacle [khôra] of all becoming—its wetnurse, as it were.58

The khôra was literally, and very interestingly from the perspective of the question of inspiration, the territory outside of the city of Athens. Plato treats that outside as a source for the emergence into the inside of all becoming. It is a third thing. It is a receptacle, womb-like, from the association with a wetnurse. In fact, Plato will have Timaeus describe the relationships between these three things in terms of a family dynamic: For the moment, we need to keep in mind three types of things: that which comes to be, that in which it comes to be, and that after which the thing coming to be is modeled., and that which is the source of its coming to be. It is in fact appropriate to compare the receiving thing to a mother, the source to a father, and the nature between them to their offspring.59

This complicates for me the idea of the khôra since all three of the different types of things that Plato describes are in the description all human. They can be parsed in terms of the mother’s womb as the receptacle, the khôra, the father’s sperm as the source of life, and the offspring as the thing that becomes. That is all pretty different from the original formulation in terms of the Same and the Different. Plato himself acknowledges the difficulty here and all but throws up his hands: This is, of course, the reason why we shouldn’t call the mother or receptacle of what has come to be, of what is visible or perceivable in every other way, either earth or air, fire or water, or any of their compounds or their constitu Plato, Timaeus, 1251 (48e-49a).  Ibid., 1253 (50c-d).

58 59

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ents. But if we speak of it as an invisible and characterless sort of thing, one that receives all things and shares in the most perplexing way in what is intelligible, a thing extremely difficult to comprehend….60

To speak of something that is an invisible and characterless sort of thing sounds like speaking of the Lacanian real, what is present but not yet symbolized. It is a thinking about what has not yet been thought, but can be thought and may be thought. Immanuel Kant, in the first Critique, takes on a similar problem: where do our ideas come from? Another way to put this question that Kant is addressing would be to ask, how do we think? The initial answer is that we think in concepts. Most of our concepts are concepts of objects, our thinking is mostly about objects in the world about which we think. Furthermore, there is some inherent similarity between our concepts and the things in the world about which we think so that Kant says: In all subsumptions of an object under a concept the representations of the former must be homogeneous with the latter, i.e., the concept must contain that which is represented in the object that is to be subsumed under it, for that is just what it means by the expression ‘an object is contained under a concept.’61

Having a mere concept, however, is not really thinking. To think we have to understand, and to understand we must subsume the concept of an object under the “pure concepts of the understanding,” which Kant gives us in the Table of Categories, of which there are four categories each with three “moments.” These are not concepts that we derive from experience but concepts that make our experience possible, or rather, our thinking, our understanding of the world, possible. One of the categories that Kant explicitly refers to in this section is the category of ‘causality.’ Part of what it means to understand the world is to understand what causes what. But, as Hume famously established, we do not actually see causation. Kant’s solution to the difficulty raised by Hume is to make causality a concept of pure understanding. But, if we do not derive causality from experience, which is to say, that we do not have any actual experience of causality, how can we think the world in terms of causality? Well, as Kant  Ibid., 1254 (51a-b).  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), A136, 271. 60 61

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says, “there must be a third thing.” There are regular concepts of objects and the objects of which they are concepts which we experience, and there are the pure concepts of the understanding and how the world works, i.e., causally, that we do not experience, how are they connected? Here is the short paragraph in which Kant gives the answer: Now it is clear that there must be some third thing, which must stand in homogeneity with the category on the one hand and the appearance on the other, and makes possible the application of the former to the latter. This mediating representation must be pure (without anything empirical) and yet intellectual on the one hand and sensible on the other. Such a representation is the transcendental schema.62

The transcendental schema, therefore, functions like a chiasmus or a khôra, it is the connecting link between the mind and the world. It makes understanding the world possible. It is a kind of crack in thought by which the light gets in. As Kant says, echoing Plato, “This schematism of our understanding with regard to appearances and their mere form is a hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true operations we can divine from nature and lay unveiled before our eyes only with great difficulty.”63 The question of inspiration is the question of from where do new ideas come? Peirce has an answer to this question and the answer is that new ideas come to us via abduction. As Peirce says in the essay “The Nature of Meaning,” “Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces a new idea….”64 Peirce says in “The Three Normative Sciences,” “All the ideas of science come to it by the way of abduction. Abduction consists in studying facts and devising a theory to explain them. Its only justification is that if we are ever to understand things at all, it must be in that way.”65 An abduction is on the order of a guess. It is, as K. T. Fann puts is, “a kind of guessing instinct.”66 As Peirce himself puts it, “abduction is…nothing but guessing.”67 It is guessing, but of a very special sort. As Peirce points in “The Nature of Meaning,” if it were merely guessing, there would not have been enough  Ibid., A138, 272.  Ibid., A144, 275. 64  Peirce, Essential Peirce, 216. 65  Ibid., 205. 66  K. T. Fann, Peirce’s Theory of Abduction (Singapore: Partridge Publishing, 2020), 37. 67  Peirce, CW, 7.219. 62 63

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time from the beginning of human beings to the present for a physicist to guess her way to a theory that actually explains the facts. “Think of what trillions and trillions of hypotheses might be made….”68 Peirce gives this explanation for how we can guess right, how “after two or three or at the very most a dozen guesses, the physicist hits pretty nearly on the correct hypothesis.”69 It appears to me that the cleanest statement we can make of the logical situation,—the freest from all questionable admixture,—is to say that man has a certain Insight, not strong enough to be oftener wrong than right, into the Thirdness, the general elements of Nature. An Insight, I call it, because it is to be referred to the same general class of operations to which Perceptive Judgments belong. This faculty is at the same time of the general nature of Instinct, resembling the instincts of animals in so far surpassing the general powers of our reason and for directing us as if we were in possession of facts that are entirely beyond the reach of our senses. It resembles instinct too in its small liability to error; for though it goes wrong oftener than right, yet the relative frequency with which it is right is on the whole the most wonderful thing in our constitution.70

Just as a beaver can “see” the best spot to build a dam, we can “see” Thirdness in an assemblage of things. We can “see” the coördination that makes of a variety a unity. There is some connection between us and Nature that makes possible the reading of the signs of Nature, like the tracks of a rabbit in the snow. So, as Peirce says, “just as we say that a body is in motion and not that motion is in a body, we ought to say that we are in thought, and not that thoughts are in us.”71 Emerson says of moments of inspiration, “We might say of these memorable moments of life that we were in them, not they in us.”72 All of which is just to say that we are immersed in a signifying field of signs, only some of which are we currently aware. As Austin Bailey puts it, “Like Peirce, Emerson defined subjectivity as the product of semiosis, rather than semiosis as the product of subjectivity.”73 Insight, inspiration,  Peirce, Essential Peirce, 217.  Ibid. 70  Peirce, Essential Peirce, 217-218. 71  Peirce, CW, 5.289n.1. 72  Emerson, Complete Writings, 811. 73  Austin Bailey, “‘Man Himself is a Sign’: Emerson, C.  S. Peirce, and the Semiosis of Mind,” in ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, vol. 64, Number 4, 2018, p. 683 68 69

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is really the process of reading the signs that we have not previously been able to perceive. We are in them, not they in us. And there is a kind of gap between our thinking them and their outer configuration. There is a gap and a bridge. “The third is that which bridges over the chasm…and brings them into relationship,”74 says Peirce. There is a labyrinth, a mystification of signs, and a thread the marks the way out or in. Emerson describes a nature remarkably similar to Paz’s labyrinth. He describes a homemade instrument comprised of strings upon a board and when the wind blows through it you can hear “the sadness of Nature, yet, at the changes, tones of triumph and festal notes ringing out all measures of loftiness.”75 A fiesta of Nature, indeed. In the end then thinking is, as Paz says, a collaboration. We read the signs, but the signs also must be given. As Leonard Cohen sings, “We asked for signs / The signs were sent.” If we do not search we will not find. But it is in us and in the situation that we should find the signs. It requires, Emerson says, concentration, “the secret of power, intellectual or physical, is concentration,”76 which I understand to be just a word to describe the intentionality that is required to read the signs. As Bailey says, “In characterizing mindedness as a collaboration between nature and experience—as an ‘appearance’ that ‘corresponds to some natural state of the mind’—Emerson suggests that ideas in fact depend on nature, in the form of a sign, in order to be ‘described,’ and, equally, that ‘man’ depends on the natural sign in order to be ‘understood.’”77 We now have, from Emerson, Peirce, and Paz, a relatively clear description of how new thoughts happen. The gap in the graph that Peirce draws to characterize the way future thoughts can assert their insistency in the present moment in relation to past thoughts has, a still somewhat mysterious but rather more clear than previously, a bridge. What clarifies Plato’s chiasmus and Kant’s schemata is the idea that thoughts are not so much generated internally, nor simply given externally, but that thinking takes the form of a collaboration between the thinker and nature.

 Peirce, CW, 1.359.  Emerson, Complete Writings, 814. 76  Ibid., 1262. 77  Bailey, “Man Himself is a Sign,” 691. 74 75

CHAPTER 8

Emerson and Irigaray: The Sorites of Ethical Difference

“La Nature aime les croisements.”1 —Emerson quoting Fourier in “Inspiration” “If there is no double desire, the positive and negative poles divide themselves between the sexes instead of establishing a chiasmus or a double loop in which each can go toward the other and come back to itself.”2 —Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference

Charlene Haddock Seigfried is very critical of reading Emerson as in any way a feminist. Her analysis of Emerson’s apparent inclusion of women and children in Nature sees this inclusion as problematic: “The problem remains that the relation of man to nature reproduces a patriarchal interpretation of the relation of man to woman.” She sees a “slippage from man to human to man,” so that “the man addressed as human is the male sex, as is more explicitly seen toward the end of ‘Nature.’”3 What she associates with “the male sex” is something like the ‘will to domination’: “The language of an absolute, brute dominance by which man tames nature has  Emerson, Complete Writings, 814.  Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 9. 3  Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 130. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Gilmore, Emerson as Philosopher, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32546-5_8

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been mitigated into stewardship, to be sure, but the hierarchical relations are unchanged and nontransferable, since it would still be perceived as unnatural for nature to overpower spirit as for a woman to be the guardian of man.”4 I do not really want to dispute this critique of Emerson, but I do see in this critique an opening, a crack, a gap that allows for an alternative interpretation. I agree with Seigfried that Emerson’s use of ‘man’ addressed as human does sometimes, even often, slip into ‘man’ as the male sex. The case I would like to make however is that Emerson also addresses something like ‘the human,’ and specifically the human in light of the question of sexual difference. I find in Irigaray’s analysis of sexual difference a very helpful suggestion of how to read Emerson. Irigaray and Emerson will make problematic the simple gender binary that is normative in modernism and replace it with a complicated ambiguous movement between genders, between gender poles. What Irigaray and Emerson are offering is a postmodern solution to the problem of sexual difference. The movement between gender poles sets up a continuum that engages the sorites paradox with a penumbral mid-area of maximum vagueness and ambiguity. I will consider some parts of Irigaray’s text An Ethics of Sexual Difference and contrast what she says with a passage from Emerson’s essay “The Method of Nature.” Irigaray begins her book by saying, “Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age. According to Heidegger, each age has one issue to think through, and one only. Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our ‘salvation’ if we thought it through.”5 This is a very postmodern thing to say. It is postmodern in its concern with gender issues. It is postmodern in its reference to Heidegger, an important precursor and source of postmodern thinking. It is postmodern in its use of scare quotes around “salvation,” simultaneously accessing the religious language and thinking, and ironically distancing itself from that kind of historically oppressive metanarrative. It is postmodern in its intent to be suspicious of the ideologies of gender that control us in our culture and in its commitment to dismantle, for the sake of justice, aspects of those ideologies.

4 5

 Ibid.  Luce Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, 5.

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Irigaray wants to construct a vocabulary of sexual difference. She is continuing the work of Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, with some differences, without exactly naming Beauvoir as a source, which argues that what we think of as the female is really a male ideological construct: the female defined in terms of the not-male. As Irigaray says, A revolution in thought and ethics is needed if the work of sexual difference is to take place. We need to reinterpret everything concerning the relations between the subject and discourse, the subject and the world, the subject and the cosmic, the microcosmic and the macrocosmic. Everything, beginning with the way the subject has always been written in the masculine form, as man, even when it claimed to be universal or neutral. Despite the fact that man—at least in French—rather than being neutral, is sexed.6

The difference between Beauvoir’s project in The Second Sex and Irigaray’s project in The Ethics of Sexual Difference is that Beauvoir sees as the solution to gender oppressions a move toward gender equality, so that one could say something like ‘gender makes no difference,’ whereas Irigaray wants to maintain an idea of essential gender difference. Irigaray describes the problem in terms of a negation at the center of woman. Woman moves outward “toward,” but lacks a positivity to which to return. This she will describe in terms of a need to recover an internal polarity. This polarity needs to be both internal, to the woman and to the man, and external, between the woman and the man. This is the way Irigaray says it: In this possible nonsublimation of herself, and by herself, woman always tends toward without any return to herself as the place where something positive can be elaborated….If there is no double desire, the positive and negative poles divide themselves between the two sexes instead of establishing a chiasmus or double loop in which each can go toward the other and come back to the self. If these positive and negative poles are not found in both, the same one always attracts, while the other remains in motion but lacks a “proper” place. What is missing is the double pole of attraction and support, which excludes disintegration or rejection, attraction and decomposition, but

6

 Ibid., 6.

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which instead ensures the separation that articulates every encounter and makes possible speech, promises, alliances.7

Already there are some echoes of Emerson here in the reference to poles and polarities that are internal and between people. Emerson refers to an inherent polarity pervasive in nature in several essays, as when he says, in “The American Scholar,” “That great principle of Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; and, as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity….”8 There is also the figure of the chiasmus which Irigaray describes as a “double loop in which each can go toward the other and come back to the self.” This figure ought to exist between the two people, but also internally in each person. This figure of the chiasmus, especially the way it is described by Irigaray as a double loop, sounds a lot like what the movement of polarity described by Emerson would look like if schematically drawn. As I have mentioned, the ‘chi’ in “chiasmus” is from the Greek ‘chi’ which is the figure of the X, the cross, and is up-dated by Irigaray for her own purposes with loops. The diagram, then, of what Irigaray describes in the above section would look like: Female → → →

→ → → Male

I will just add that internal to each loop would be a replication of the figure of the looping chiasmus, to indicate the internal form of the looping chiasmus, and I suppose, that iterated to infinity. When Irigaray says that this figure “ensures the separation that articulates every encounter and makes possible speech, promises, alliances,” I understand by that, that if this figure does not obtain, then speech, promises, and alliance become impossible. If the woman (and the man) does not have the internal looping chiasmus, then speech, promises, and alliances will not be possible; and if the looping chiasmus does not occur between the woman and the man, then speech, promises, and alliances cannot occur. Since we all have both polarities, I do not see this being about an anatomical woman and 7 8

 Ibid., 9.  Emerson, Essays, 62.

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man so much as about the looping movement between the poles of sexual difference within us all and, potentially, between us all. Sexual difference as Irigaray talks about it functions like a version of the Taoist yin yang. A little earlier, Irigaray claims, “Sexual difference would constitute the horizon of worlds more fecund than any known to date….but also the production of a new age of thought, art, poetry, and language: the creation of a new poetics.”9 I understand this idea of a new poetics to be the fruit of the internalization by woman (and man) of the looping chiasmus, which would be an acknowledgment and acceptance and an understanding of their inner polarity; and a preparedness to acknowledge, accept, and understand the polarity with the other. The moment of acknowledgement, acceptance, and understanding is an affirmation and an event. In order to claim the positivity of the inner chiasmus Irigaray formulates a new vocabulary for understanding woman. The first term of this vocabulary is the figure of the ‘envelope’: “The transition to a new age requires a change in our perception and conception of space-time, the inhabiting of places, and of containers, or envelopes of identity.”10 In the process of opening up the concept of the envelope Irigaray employs the concepts of threshold and lips: …Perhaps we are passing through an era when time must redeploy space? A new morning of and for the world? A remaking of immanence and transcendence, notably through this threshold which has never been examined as such: the female sex. The threshold that gives access to the mucous. Beyond classical oppositions of love and hate, liquid and ice—a threshold that is always half-open. The threshold of lips, which are strangers to dichotomy and oppositions. Gathered one against the other but without any possible suture, at least of a real kind….They offer a shape of welcome but do not assimilate, reduce, or swallow up. A sort of voluptuousness? They are not useful, except as that which designates a place, the very place of uselessness, at least as it is habitually understood. Strictly speaking, they serve neither conception nor jouissance. Is this the mystery of feminine identity?11

This, in style and content, is the very anti-thesis of a phallic thrust of an argument. It is allusive and elusive, with questions and half-formed thoughts, simultaneously metaphorical and literal. It claims as a positive  Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, 5.  Ibid., 7. 11  Ibid., 18. 9

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what traditionally, and most emphatically in Freud, is taken as a negative, a lack. I am shocked by her language, as I should be. Here is a relatively short passage from Emerson’s essay “The Method of Nature” (1941): We ought to celebrate this hour by expressions of manly joy. Not thanks, nor prayer seem quite the highest or truest name for our communication with the infinite,—but glad and conspiring reception,—reception that becomes giving in its turn, as the receiver is only the All-Giver in part and in infancy. I cannot,—nor can any man,—speak precisely of things so sublime, but it seems to me the wit of man, his strength, his grace, his tendency, his art, is the grace and presence of God. It is beyond explanation. When all is said and done, the rapt saint is found the only logician. Not exhortation, and not argument becomes our lips, but paeans of joy and praise.12

We, in our twenty-first-century postmodern sensibilities, are immediately put off by this passage by the sexist reference to “manly joy.” This is our mistake. That “manly joy” is an evasion and a seduction. It is a sop to Cerebus. This passage is about reception and about lips. This passage, rightly read, is shocking. It is made shocking by its similarities with the passage from Irigaray. Not only are there similarities of style—it is allusive and elusive—and content—there is the affirmation of the polarity of receptive lips to the counter-pole of “manly,” “giving” penis, but the overall intellectual, political, prescriptive intent is the same: that we must internalize the looping chiasmus of the poles of male and female. Emerson is always extremely careful in his choice of words, and seeks to maximize the potential meanings. When he says, “Not exhortation, and not argument becomes our lips, but paeans of joy and praise” we should be alert to the ambiguity of “becomes.” On the one hand, the overt meaning here is to read “becomes” as meaning, ‘that which is appropriate to,’ but the formulation is odd, and that oddness should signal for us that something more is going on. The other, and more natural, more common, meaning of “becomes” is when something ‘turns into,’ as in “becomes human.” On this reading, paeans of joy and praise become our lips, our means of reception, and they are the mucous which lubricates the way.

 Emerson, Essays, 116-17.

12

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What Emerson finds so “unhandsome” is the “lubricity” of objects. This reference to lubricity, to the slipperiness of things, recalls Irigaray’s invocation of mucous. Her point is, strangely, very similar to Emerson’s point. Mucous stands, for Irigaray, for all that causes normative disgust, what we are supposed to feel disgust at. This includes, for Irigaray, women, which are not a “different” sex, but, normatively, a lesser sex. Furthermore, mucous, although men have plenty of mucous, mucous is associated with the female, with women. That is part of what arouses the normative sense of disgust toward women, what Julia Kristeva calls the “monstrous feminine.” Irigaray’s point is that we need to learn a different normative lessen which is to embrace the different. This is a very postmodern idea. Disgust is triggered by, among other things, the in between, that which exists in the border between. Mucous represents for Irigaray the very substance of the in between. It lubricates and makes passage through the in between possible and smooth. As Emerson has said, he has “set his heart on honesty,”13 and honesty for him includes the acknowledgement, acceptance, and understanding of the polarity of male and female within himself. This is not the only time that Emerson embodies the female principle within himself. As Cavell has noted, there is an equally amazing passage in the essay “Experience” where Emerson is pretty clearly, although, again, not without evasions and seductions for those unprepared for honesty and the truth, imagining himself as becoming impregnated, being pregnant, and then giving birth.14 Here are some of the relevant lines of Emerson’s imagining himself in the position of a woman. “Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions, —objects, all successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas.”15 It is hard to know where to begin with this. It is explicitly about “creative power.” It is about a power that in its exercise ‘absorbs.’ In the process of absorption, “all things” come tumbling in, “Nature, art, persons, letters, religions” and even God. This, I take to be, an imagining of what Emerson thinks it would feel like to become impregnated, to be ejaculated into, and to want that ejaculation, with a ‘rapacious’ desire. This imagining is not that  Ibid., 483.  Cavell, Etudes, 129. 15  Emerson, Essays, 487. 13 14

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farfetched for Emerson. It is what he imagines every time he sits to write an essay. He wants to be a receiver of “nature, art, persons, letters, religions” and God. He is all lips, which receive and then give birth. Continuing later in that paragraph there is the line: “The great and crescive self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants all relative existence…,”16 which Cavell suggests is his imagining of his growing pregnancy.17 The paragraph ends with an account of love which seems to recreate the figure of the looping chiasmus used by Irigaray: “Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and whilst they remain in contact all other points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union lasts the more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire.”18 “Inert” here does not mean ‘not in motion.’ It just means not in interactive motion with the other sphere. The whole system is in motion, driven by appetency. There are more references that can be taken as alluding to or imagining his own pregnancy: “the subject enlarges,” “the soul attains her due sphericity,” until finally, there is a birth: “When I receive a gift, I do not macerate my body…”19 Cavell refers to the “presence of births buried in the essay,” and correlates that fact with the idea, outrageously claimed, that “what the essay is remembering, or membering the one will it creates itself to obey, and creates in order to obey, is that which puts in motion, the will of a listening, persisting reader. That would be, would, so to speak, give birth to, experience.”20 My own reading is that Cavell actually misses the real emphasis in these passages of Emerson, which is not on the “motion” of the ‘member,’ but on the imagining of its reception. As Emerson says in the essay, rather definitively, “All I know is reception.”21 As a matter of fact, however, it is all sorites. Emerson is writing, “All I know is reception.” That is, as he writes he is not exactly receiving so much as producing. I emphasize the female components to counter-­ balance Cavell’s emphasis on the male, but Cavell is not wrong that the male “member” is there as well. The sorites recapitulates the form of the looping chiasmus. There are poles between which the movement occurs. There is a penumbra, a place of maximum ambiguity. It is the place where  Ibid., 487.  Cavell, Etudes, 129. 18  Emerson, Essays, 487. 19  Ibid., 491. 20  Cavell, Etudes, 128. 21  Emerson, Essays, 491. 16 17

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the lines cross. The symbol is not meant to be read as static, but as in constant movement, as the world is in a state of constant change. One way of framing the poles is in terms of Being and Becoming. Being is emphasized in the back loop, and Becoming in the forward loop. Becoming emerges from being, being is always evolving into becoming. The place of maximum creative potential is in the present moment marked by the crossing of the paths. The poles can be framed in terms of male—female, where each of these names, following Irigaray, a kind of movement, with the female moving outward toward the other and the male moving inward toward a center. I take this as a stipulative rather than essentialist definition of male and female, useful for distinguishing two poles of human being. Since the movement is constant between the poles, the male principle is constantly being transformed into the female principle and vice versa. We, human beings, live this movement. We are inherently ambiguous. I take Irigaray’s defense of sexual difference to be the very opposite of the violent binary distinction that is culturally normative. Her identification of sexual difference is about understanding our own ambiguity with respect to sexual difference, not about trying to enforce a systematic form of sexual difference. It is meant to be empowering, both to women and to men, by recognizing and acknowledging this sexual difference so that we can work with this movement in us instead of against it in conformity to social norms. Emerson sees and argues for this same possibility in a language that is as elusive and allusive, as postmodern, as Irigaray’s.

Ironic Sex, Active Sex “To get the irony of a text, the reader has to be able to imagine the author’s point of view….irony is an invitation to the reader to share the writer’s critical attitude to the object of the irony.”22 —Toril Moi, What is a Woman? “A nontraditional, fecund encounter between the sexes barely exists...A revolution in thought and ethics is needed if the work of sexual difference is to take place.”23 —Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference

22  Toril Moi, What is a Woman? And Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 174. 23  Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, 6.

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Just as Emerson and Peirce say that we are in thought, I read Irigaray as saying something like that we are in sex. That ‘in’ suggests both that we are not the source of our thought but that the ideas are all around us waiting, as it were, to be thought; but also that thinking is an activity so that being in thought is like the body in motion. Irigaray is saying the same thing about sex and sexual difference. Irigaray describes sexual difference in terms of a looping chiasmus, a looping chiasmus that exists between the two sexes, but is also internal to each sex. The loop describes a pattern of motion that we are, as a sex. We are continually in motion internally and between the sexes. The movement she describes in terms of two poles and the movement is precisely from one pole to the other. Again, here is the description of the movement: If these positive and negative poles are not found in both, the same one always attracts, while the other remains in motion but lacks a “proper” place. What is missing is the double pole of attraction and support, which excludes the disintegration or rejection, attraction and decomposition, but which instead insures the separation that articulates every encounter and makes possible speech, promises, alliances.

We all have male and female principles internal to us, constituting us, and those principles themselves are in a kind of dialectic movement with each other. The model to understand this, it seems to me, is the idea of a conversation. “I says to myself, sez I…” is the conversation that we have with ourselves and a version of the conversation that we have with others. As with any conversation, there is a time to talk (the positive pole) and a time to listen (the negative pole). There is a time to be manly, say, aggressive, and a time to be womanly, say, gentle and accepting. We live this dialectic individually and interpersonally every day. Irigaray, far from essentializing sexual difference, what she is so often accused of, is instead describing what makes sexual identity, sexual difference, powerful. She is describing how the power of sexual difference emerges, manifests, can be used. Sexual difference is, to use a word preferred by Irigaray fecund. As Irigaray says, Sexual difference would constitute the horizon of worlds more fecund than any known to date—at least in the West—and without reducing the fecundity to the reproduction of bodies and flesh. For loving partners this would

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be a fecundity of birth as regeneration, but also the production of a new age of thought, art, poetry, and language: a new poetics.24

It is what we all want to be, whether we quite want to understand it or not, we all want to be fecund. Plato says the same thing in the Symposium, the one thing every living thing wants is to reproduce itself. Plato has Diotima say, “‘what Love wants is…Reproduction and birth in beauty.’”25 Irigaray’s critique of the patriarchy, of phallogocentrism is of the way the system stops the movement between the poles. This is as damaging to men as it is to women, or, anyway, it is damaging to both men and women. She describes what happens if there are not poles, that is, two poles. Then it is no longer a looping chiasmus but just the repetition of some circular motion repeating the ready-made values of masculinity or of femininity. The same is as true of the individual as of two people interacting. There is no reason to expect fecundity from a person repeating the pattern of a one sex ready-made value, nor to expect fecundity to emerge between two doing the same. What it means to participate in the looping chiasmus of sexual difference is to really engage with the sexual difference of the other, each, mutually, reciprocally, or it does not work for either, which is to say, no fecundity. This is what I understand Irigaray’s feminist critique to be. It is a male-­ dominated public discourse in which the female cannot be spoken. There can be no dialectic, no real conversation in such a discourse. Since it is precisely dialectic, conversation, that makes fecundity possible, the current discourse is not good for anyone. Irigaray is trying to change the discourse. And how does she propose to change the discourse? Well, she models a very different way of talking, of reading, of thinking, and pervading this new model of speech is irony. Moi discusses Irigaray’s use of irony in the context of Irigaray mimicking Freud’s voice: Simply by quoting him, she produces a certain distance between the reader and Freud; and by being ironical about the quote she invites the reader to share her attitude, to hear Freud’s words in the same way she does. To quote someone is a speech act like any other: the responsibility for the quotation lies with the speaker. To quote someone ironically, moreover, is certainly not

 Ibid., 3.  Plato, Symposium, 490 (206e).

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to efface one’s own voice; on the contrary, it is to lay bare one’s trust in that voice.26

As Moi makes clear, Irigaray’s use of Freud’s, as it were, male voice works on a number of levels. One level is Irigaray thinking as Freud. That is a looping chiasmus: the poles are Irigaray and Freud, and contained in those poles issues of sexual difference, of male and female. The original gesture of quotation, which seems to be a relinquishing of one’s own voice, and to favor the male voice, gets reversed when the quotation is done ironically. Now the voice that is heard by the reader is Irigaray’s voice, as it were, her thinking about Freud thinking. And that is another looping chiasmus. The first loop movement is Irigaray thinking into Freud’s thinking, the second looping chiasmus is our, the reader’s, thinking into Irigaray’s thinking about Freud’s thinking. Robin Dunbar calls these levels of “intentionality”27 and the thinking about levels of intentionality “philosophy of mind.” ‘Intentionality’ “refers to the state of being aware of the contents of your own mind.” The first level is a person thinking about something, say, me thinking of a book. But, “Having a belief about someone else’s beliefs (or intentions) constitutes second order intentionality, the criterion for theory of mind.” As Dunbar says, “computers are zero-order intentional entities” and adult humans have an upper limit of “about five or six orders: Peter believes [1] that Jane thinks [2] that Sally wants [3] Peter to suppose [4] that Jane intends [5] Sally to believe [6] that her ball is under the cushion.”28 The problem is that the thinking gets so exponentially more complicated every time you go up a level that we just cannot keep so many variables in our minds at one time. The reference to the ball under the cushion refers to a fascinating experiment in theory of mind. Here is the experiment that Dunbar describes: Here is a very simple test you can do with any child. Sally and Ann are two dolls. Sally has a ball. She puts the ball under the cushion on the chair. Then, she leaves the room. While she is out of the room, Ann takes the ball out from other the cushion and hides it in the toy box on the other side of the room. Later, Sally comes back into the room. Where does Sally think the ball is?  Moi, What is a Woman?, 175.  Robin Dunbar, The Human Story: A New History of Mankind’s Evolution (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 45. 28  Ibid., 46. 26 27

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Up to the age of about four years, a child will instinctively say, ‘Sally thinks the ball is in the toy box.’ A child of this age cannot distinguish between its own knowledge of the world and that of other individuals. But between the ages of four and four and a half years, the child passes through a rapid phase of understanding. From about four and a half onwards, it will answer the question by saying that Sally thinks her ball is under the cushion, ‘…but I know it’s not.’29

Sally has no philosophy of mind. I take it that, that is Irigaray’s point about men locked in the male monodiscourse, they have no, are more or less incapable of, a theory of mind when it comes to the female, the other sex of sexual difference. This means not only shutting out the voices of actual women, but also shutting out the voice of their own inner woman. It is a terrible deafness for all parties. The point is that, that is what Irigaray is doing with Freud, she compels us, with her use of, first of all, Freud’s voice as her voice, then her voice as ironic to transform Freud’s voice from what he says to what he does not say, to jump up levels of intentionality as well. On gets that or just misses the irony and stays, as it were, deaf. The higher the levels of intentionality the more complicated the thinking, the more complicated the conversation. The level of intentionality determines both internally and externally, what kind of conversation you can have with oneself or with another person. Each level of intentionality means another looping chiasmus. In the chapter “Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato, Symposium, ‘Diotima’s Speech’” in An Ethics of Sexual Difference Irigaray raises the stakes with respect to levels of intentionality, but also complicates her own message. She enacts the process of the looping chiasmus of sexual difference thinking her way to her own male inner Plato. She takes on the voice of Diotima as expressed by Socrates as written by Plato, and does it ironically. That is five levels of intentionality, and, as Dunbar remarks about Shakespeare, who Dunbar counts as one of the very few writers who can incorporate five levels of intentionality into their works, Shakespeare must be functioning at the sixth level of intentionality.30 So too must Irigaray in her analysis of Plato, which makes what she has to say about Plato very complicated.

 Ibid., 43.  Ibid., 121.

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On the one hand, Plato seems to be doing the very thing that Irigaray is calling for, he is doing philosophy with sexual difference. He presents Diotima as the counterpart to Socrates and even gives her the superior position, although, as Irigaray points out, she is not actually present31 and probably could not be, given the norms for symposia. They are having a dialogue, which is dialectical, but the ascension is all on the part of Socrates. Furthermore, Irigaray seems to go pretty far with what Plato is doing and to endorse the counter-wisdom of Diotima just as it is written by Plato. Or rather, she finds two messages, two philosophies of love in the Diotima speech in Plato’s Symposium. The first she can endorse, and she endorses it precisely because it describes the fecundity of sexual difference, but the second she cannot endorse and suggests that it is the beginning of the monodiscourse that takes the form of metaphysics in the history of philosophy, a monodiscourse that explicitly downgrades the body and the mortality of the body. A beautiful moment to which I had been insensitive until Irigaray points it out is when Socrates protests against Diotima’s describing love as an in-between thing. As Irigaray says, “And, in response to Socrates’ protestation that love is a great God, that everyone says so or thinks so, she laughs.”32 That laughter is so beautiful because of the way laughter is, as it were, simultaneously mental and physical, a mental recognition and an involuntary bodily response. The version of love praised by Diotima is the version of love that is fully embodied, but not simply bodily. Love is a third thing, an intermediary: He is therefore and intermediary in a very specific way. Does he lose his status as a God for this reason? Not necessarily. He is neither mortal nor immortal. He is between one and the other, in a state that can be qualified as daimonic: love is a daimon. His function is to transmit to the gods what comes from men and to men what comes from the gods. Like all that is daimonic, love is complimentary to gods and to men in such a way as to put everything in touch with itself.33

“Love is thus an intermediary between pairs of opposites.”34

 Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, 20.  Ibid., 22. 33  Ibid., 22-23. 34  Ibid., 24. 31 32

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Irigaray picks up Diotima’s description of love as “engendering in beauty” to describe the “fecundity” of love, “the creative aspect of love”35: “its fecundity is medium-like, daimonic, the guarantee for all, male and female, of the immortal becoming of the living.” And then, “The fecundity of love between lovers—the regeneration of one by the other, the passage to immortality in and through each other—this seems to become the condition of procreation and not a cause in its own right.”36 I take it that the ‘immortality’ that Irigaray is talking about here is the immortality of something new that has entered the world and will send waves of influence out into all space and time, not unlike the immortality of a stone’s tossed into a lake. It is and is not an individual immortality. It is individual only insofar as the individual comprises some part of the looping chiasmus of the two in procreative love. So far so good. Then, “Diotima’s method miscarries.” The ‘miscarriage’ occurs with the elimination of the Third. As Irigaray says, “she leads love into a split between mortality and immortality, and love loses its daimonic character. Is this the foundational act of meta-physics?”37 It would be the foundational act of meta-physics, and of metaphysics, because it leaves, as it were, nature, physics, behind and makes the thing of ultimate value not of this world but of some other world. This world is described by physics, the other world by something more than physics, hence meta-­ physics. I read Irigaray as saying that Plato was doing pretty well imaging his way into the feminine until his male monodiscourse voice kicked in and kicked the feminine out. It seems to me possible, even quite likely, that this was not unconscious on the part of Plato. That Plato himself was speaking ironically, that he returns to the male voice for the sake of all of his male readers and not to be sentenced to death by Athens, but who can know with Plato. There is another possibility for why Plato cannot maintain his dialectical relationship with the feminine and that is because he speaks and writes from the perspective of the masculine. As Irigaray says, “the other who is forever unknowable is the one who differs from me sexually.” It is precisely this difference which generates the “wonder” that actually makes sexual difference so fecund. But if sexual difference is an encounter with an absolute, a “forever,” unknowable, then there is some sense in which  Ibid., 25.  Ibid., 26. 37  Ibid., 27. 35 36

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we are all unknowable to ourselves insofar as each contains their own looping chiasmus of sexual difference, each contains an element of the unknowable. Using Emerson’s language, the NOT ME is ME, and the ME is the NOT ME. Thinking is just the engagement, the looping chiasmus, of the ME trying to think the NOT ME, and vice versa. To this extent, thinking will always remain incomplete, fallible, open to further thinking. So, I see Plato’s limitation, the limitation that Irigaray identifies, not in his attempt to think the feminine, but in his attempt to find some closure to that thinking. That, it seems to me, is the authentic origin of metaphysics. The only remedy to metaphysics is semiotics. Can Emerson be connected to this story about levels of intentionality through which I am reading Irigaray on sexual difference? I think so. In an essay entitled “Emerson’s Natures: Origins and Possibilities for American Environmental Thought” Douglas Anderson says, “Concerning nature…I have found at least four Emersonian conceptions working together.”38 The four conceptions of nature listed by Anderson are 1) natura naturata (passive nature, nature as things), 2) natura naturans (active nature, nature naturing), 3) the dialectic between natura naturata and natura naturans, and 4) nature as environment, as wilderness.39 I like this list and appreciate the modesty of “at least” because I would want to add one more, a fifth conception, but of nature as a Third thing, the bridge between nature as the NOT ME, which are the four forms of nature that Anderson describes, and the nature that IS ME, which is what Emerson himself arrives at by the end of Nature: “So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes….What we are, that only can we see.”40 This is the nature of the looping chiasmus. The intertwining of the me and the not me that characterizes sexual difference for Irigaray. Since, as I have been arguing all along, for Emerson, nature itself functions as a kind of mind, Emerson’s ascension up the various levels of nature’s thought from nature as other, and the four levels of that otherness identified by Anderson, to nature as me AND the other, in a looping chiasmus of difference and sameness. Which would put Emerson at the sixth level of intentionality. No wonder it is so hard to get a definite read on what he is saying.

38  Doug R.  Anderson, “Emerson’s Natures: Origins of and Possibilities for American Environmental Thought” in New Morning: Emerson in the Twenty First Century, 152. 39  Ibid., 152-53. 40  Emerson, Essays, 48.

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I have been arguing that Plato sets up Diotima as the sexual (and philosophical) other to Socrates and that Irigaray applauds that and then criticizes Plato when he veers away from this open-minded engagement with the ambiguities of sexual difference that alone make sexual difference fecund, to insist on a reductive binary of the mortal and immortal that then recapitulates the binary of sexual difference that is the non-sexual difference of the monodiscourse. Emerson too has an essay on Plato in which he discusses a number of Plato’s dialogues including the Banquet. I see many similarities between the looping chiasmus Socrates of the Socrates-Diotima and the Socrates that Emerson describes. There is the irony, of course, but also the wiliness and the humor but the case is too much for me to try to make. I will only identify one thing that Emerson says about Socrates that for me connects Emerson’s Socrates with Irigaray’s. Emerson says of Socrates, “he always knew the way out; knew it, yet would not tell it.” 41 Inside the fly-bottle is the dialectic of binaries. The way out is the Third that is always there, but very difficult to see. It emerges as the Third of sexual difference. That is what fecundity is. That is what it is to be creative and procreative. That’s why Socrates was a midwife, showing people the way to the opening, the lips of transcendence. The, as Irigaray describes it, chiasmus of the two sets of lips, lips that talk and the lips that give birth.42

The Labyrinth of Solitude of Sexual Difference: Irigaray on Nietzsche and Ariadne After thinking about Octavio Paz it is natural to be attracted to Irigaray’s invocation of Ariadne and the labyrinth. In Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, one of Irigaray’s elemental and seductive engagements with famous philosophers, Irigaray describes the idea of sexual difference in terms of labyrinths, one’s own and another’s: She is your labyrinth, you are hers. A path from you to yourself is lost in her, and from her to herself is lost in you. And if one looks only for a play of mirrors in all this, does one not create the abyss? Looking only for attractions to return into the first and only to dwelling, does one not hollow out the abyss?

 Ibid., 651.  Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, 18.

41 42

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Unless difference is affirmed, the inclusion of you in her, and her in you, spins off into labyrinthine mourning for desire or for will inside you both (vous) and between you both.43

The figure of the labyrinth may seem static, but it is in fact about motion, a moving through, going in or out. When Irigaray refers to a “return into the first and only dwelling” I read that as a description of a degenerate form of Peirce’s Secondness,44 which is an insistence on Firstness in the presence of Secondness, what Peirce describes as “perverted” and the “very debauchery of thought.”45 In a world of sexual difference, I read Irigaray as saying, men thinking in the male discourse is precisely sexually perverted and the debauchery of thought. It is thinking in a hollowed abyss, which is not really thinking at all, and certainly not fecund thinking. And Emerson? In “Intellect” Emerson says, “Every thought is a prison also.” It is a prison precisely insofar as it resists Secondness, the movement of the looping chiasmus. In “Experience” Emerson uses the metaphor of “a prison of glass which we cannot see,” which is a version of Wittgenstein’s “fly-bottle,” but also of the labyrinth in Paz and Irigaray, Plato’s and Irigaray’s chiasmus, Plato’s and Derrida’s khôra, Irigaray’s and Emerson’s “lips.” There is always a way out, but we cannot always see it. What is needed is an encounter with the other. The way out begins with a reception, a receiving of the other that makes possible the inversion of the other into the same, into a new thought. That is what Emerson enacts in his thinking his way into his own pregnancy. He is moving in the looping chiasmas of sexual difference. There is a beautiful description of conversations with Emerson recorded in Margaret Fuller’s journal of 1842. She writes, “My time to go to him is late evening. Then I go knock at the library door and we have our long word walk through the growths of things with glimmers of light from the causes of things.”46 That, it seems to me, must be pretty close to the ideal of what Irigaray is describing when she talks about the uses of sexual difference, the possibility of word walks in which the glimmers of light come in from the causes of things. Emerson says, “insane persons are those who 43  Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche translated by Gillian C.  Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 73. 44  Peirce, CW, 5.69. 45  Ibid., 5.396, degenerate secondness, 5.69. 46  Urbas, Emerson’s Metaphysics, 137.

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hold fast to one thought, and do not flow with the course of nature.”47 It is, as I understand Irigaray’s critique, a kind of insanity to be locked in the discourse of only one sex. The emotion that is elicited in the encounter, the genuine encounter, with the other sex Irigaray says is “wonder”; “To arrive at the constitution of an ethics of sexual difference, we must at least return to what is for Descartes the first passion: wonder.”48 And then making it more explicit: Who or what the other is, I never know. But the other who is forever unknowable is the one who differs from me sexually. This feeling of surprise, astonishment, and wonder in the face of the unknowable ought to be returned to its locus: that of sexual difference….Sometimes a space for wonder is left to works of art. But it is never found to reside in this locus: between man and woman. Into this place came attraction, greed, possession, consummation, disgust, and so on. But not that wonder which beholds what it sees always as if for the first time, never taking hold of the other as its object. It does not try to seize, possess, or reduce this object, but leaves it subjective, still free.49

Here we have why it is an ethics of sexual difference, and the sustaining passion is wonder. In wonder the other remains subject. ‘Genius’ as Emerson describes it in “Intellect” is itself dialectical, a looping chiasmus with two poles that could be understood as sexed in Irigaray’s sense. Emerson says, “To genius must always go two gifts, the thought and the publication. The first is revelation, always a miracle, which no frequency of occurrence or incessant study can ever familiarize, but which must leave the inquirer stupid with wonder.”50 I have already discussed Emerson’s anti-ethics of ‘clutching,’ the, as Emerson says, “most unhandsome part of our condition”51 anticipating Irigaray’s “taking hold of the other as object.” I see in what Emerson is describing a hope and a proposal that is similar to Irigaray’s. What is wanted is a future world in which new possibilities open up that, I suppose one could say, raise many more people to higher levels of intentionality. As Irigaray puts it, repeating a line I have already quoted, “Sexual difference would constitute the horizon of worlds more fecund than any known to date….”

 Emerson, Essays, 119.  Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, 12. 49  Ibid., 13. 50  Emerson, Essays, 422. 51  Ibid., 473. 47 48

CHAPTER 9

Emerson and Derrida: On the Track of the Circle Trace

“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”1 —Emerson, “Circles” “…the undermining of ontology which, in its innermost course, has determined the meaning of being as presence….To make enigmatic what on thinks one understands by the words ‘proximity,’ ‘immediacy,’ ‘presence’…, is our final intention in this essay.”2 —Derrida, Of Grammatology

The connection between Emerson and Derrida is not an obvious one. In virtually every way they would seem to be very different. Emerson talks a lot about God and Truth and Nature as if access to these were possible with the right attitude and approach. This idea is precisely the idea of the possibility of “presence,” which is the one idea that Derrida consistently attacks in all of his writings. Emerson writes for a popular audience and was indeed quite popular. Derrida seems to be willfully obscure, defying access to his texts with obscure concepts, like “onto-theology,” “trace,” “exergue,” and invented or reinvented words, like “différance,”  Ibid., 403.  Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2016), 76. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Gilmore, Emerson as Philosopher, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32546-5_9

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“deconstruction,” and “grammatology.” Emerson comes across as New England sage with a very specific moral message to teach. Derrida appears as a jester, an endless player, for whom nothing is sacred, least of all morality. And yet, and yet, I will argue, in almost every way their messages are really very similar, and their styles are very similar, and their moral messages are very similar. This is a paradox, this seeming so different while being really so similar, until the dawning of certain aspects, until a specific perspective is adopted that opens up ways of opening up the works of Emerson and Derrida to reveal their occluded similarities. I will argue that Emerson is considerably more obscure than he appears, and that Derrida is considerably more morally serious than he generally lets on. To make the case for Emerson’s similarity to Derrida I will primarily refer to three essays, “Circles,” “Nominalist and Realist,” and “Experience.” For Derrida’s similarity to Emerson I will primarily be referring to his Of Grammatology. I can explain my basic argument quite quickly, which I will do, and then I will adduce textual evidence in support of that argument and further elaborate on the argument. The basic argument is that Emerson, in the essay “Circles,” describes an epistemology of circles within circles. Where Plato had an epistemology that he illustrated (in words) with the image of a divided line that was meant to reflect levels of reality to which corresponded levels of knowing, Emerson uses a very different image, the image of circles within circles. Since Plato’s image is hierarchical, with certain forms of knowledge transcendent over other forms of knowledge, one might initially think that Emerson, as a Transcendentalist, might go along with Plato’s image, but as his own essay on the Transcendentalists, “The Transcendentalist,” makes clear, Emerson has little truck with what was commonly associated with Transcendentalism. I will go into this question of Emerson’s relation to the movement known as Transcendentalism later, for now I just want to highlight the, perhaps surprising, difference of image of the shape of knowledge for Plato and for Emerson. Plato being one of, if not the primary, source of the “onto-­ theology” toward which Derrida is so opposed. Emerson’s circles within circles, circles expanding into new circles, on my reading of them, maps onto Derrida’s notions of the “trace” and of “différance.” “Circle” is a metaphor. It is an ambiguous metaphor, but it suggests a kind of way of being in the world. A ‘circle’ describes a state of being comprised of all of the general ideas that we possess, including a general idea that comprehends all of those pluralities of general ideas, which is our personality, in the Peircean sense, and all of that inflected by

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a mood. A ‘circle’ is, in Peircean language, a First. We are, according to Emerson’s epistemology, continually generating new circles, or, at least, we ought to be (hence the moral imperative within Emerson’s epistemology, which is, I will just add here, the same moral imperative that will inform Derrida’s notions of the ‘trace’ and of ‘différance’). There are two reasons, which are really one reason, why we will constantly need to generate new circles. The first reason is because every circle we draw, while it will seem to us to be complete when we draw it, it will have, as it were, to quote Emerson, an inner “secret,” a “residuum unknown and unanalyzable,” that will contribute to its undoing. The second reason is related to the first, which is that as complete as our new circle will seem to us, as well as it resolves some difficulty, some Second, to use Peirce’s language, that we have encountered in the world, the world is sufficiently complex to have an endless supply of Seconds to disrupt the apparent completeness of whatever circle we have drawn. Our First, the circle we have drawn, is always flawed, incomplete, unstable, and will be disrupted by a Second. With luck and energy, we discover an idea that can resolve the apparent conflict between our old circle and some new information, some new experience and we achieve a Third, a new circle, which will feel surprising and new, then obvious and old, and we will be back in a state of Firstness that will be vulnerable to a new form of Secondness. Taken as a whole, the understanding that this picture is meant to convey is that at every moment we have a worldview, an opinion about how the world is, what we are in it, how things ought to go in this world and with us, but we should be aware that we have had such opinions before and always, always, those opinions, at some point, were disrupted, required revision, were not as stable as we felt them to be. That every opinion contained within it a principle of its own undoing, that what things mean, the right or true perspective, keeps getting differed, postponed, and is more properly understood as a hope rather than a possession, and, to be honest, not really a hope of possession so much as a hope of, maybe, approach, and maybe not even that. This, it seems to me, is precisely what Derrida is arguing for in Of Grammatology. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the translator and a commentator on Of Grammatology, makes clear, “trace” in the French “carries strong implications of track, footprint, imprint.” What the ‘trace’ is a trace of, for Derrida, is a trace of presence. Derrida is attacking the “onto-­ theology” that, according to Derrida, pervades the history of Western philosophy, Western metaphysics. “Onto-theology” is a term Derrida gets

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from Heidegger and it refers to a kind of theologizing of the “presence” of being (ontos in Greek). “Theologizing” presence means setting up an idea of the “presence” of being as a kind of holy grail for philosophy: how do we gain access to real Being? The ‘trace’ is a sign both of the apparent reality of the possibility of the presence of being (as a track in the snow might be a sign of a wolf’s passing) and a sign of its absence. There is no actual being present (just as there is no wolf present). The history of philosophy, from Plato to Heidegger, is for Derrida, a history of people claiming to have had some access to the presence of being and offering a theory of how to gain one’s own access to the presence of being. This history, for Derrida, is really just a kind of fetishizing of the presence of a being that, Godot-like, never arrives. What is this ‘trace’ a trace of? As Spivak insists, the French word trace that gets translated as “trace” has strong implications of ‘track,’ ‘footprint.’ If one comes across a wolf print, the wolf may not be present to you, but the wolf is present somewhere. If the onto-theology of the presence of being is really just a fetish, why does Derrida use a word that suggests an absence of something that is present somewhere? If being is really present somewhere, then there really is a grail and the history of philosophy has not been in vain, even if never quite successful. There is a reason, I believe, for Derrida’s intentional use of “trace” with its implication of “track,” and Derrida has a strategy for dealing with this reason that upholds his diagnosis of onto-theology as disease. I think the sense of a trace, a trace that is a track, is, phenomenologically, very real for us, especially us philosophers, but not just for philosophers. Maybe it is only a special kind of trace that philosophers are attracted to, while non-philosophers may be attracted to other kinds of traces. The sense of a trace I understand as the sense of the possibility of some kind of complete satisfaction, a dream of a wholeness that we do not possess but feel like we may have had once or might one day. It may be related to our enwombment, that real life version of Plato’s Aristophanes vision of our absolute connection with another person that feels like completeness, that makes us so satisfied that we forget the gods. It may be an illusion that emerges naturally from our have been in a state of Firstness. The thing about being in Firstness is that you do not realize that you are in Firstness. That kind of self-conscious awareness is a sign that you are already in Secondness. So, by the time we are self-aware, we are already, as it were, disturbed. The sense of being now disturbed may generate the illusion of a state prior to our being disturbed of something like a real presence of

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being, being there. We were, no doubt, somewhere when we are in Firstness, Derrida’s point however is that it was not there. Derrida’s strategy for dealing with the non-reality of the phenomenologically real ‘trace’ is to write, and it is important that he is writing it, to write trace as trace, indicating the trace “under erasure” (sous rature). As Spivak explains it, “Derrida’s trace is the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent present, of the lack at the origin that is the condition of thought and experience.”3 The trace is not nothing, but it is not something either. It is on the order of the Peircean “real” which influences things but does not exist. Spivak says that the erased trace “is the condition of thought and experience.” It is the condition of thought and experience because thought necessarily begins in Firstness. It begins in a kind of non-thought that gets disrupted and our response to that disruption is the desire and attempt to return to the quietude of Firstness via, à la Peirce, “inquiry.” That process of inquiry becomes the basis of experience. The disruption and subsequent desire and search for resolution is motivated by the sense of something lost, something we sense as a ‘trace’ of something, but, in fact, there was nothing there that is the source of that sense. The trace therefore has phenomenal reality but no ontological reality. Derrida introduces the idea of an “arche-trace,” based on the idea of an arche ̄ from the pre-Socratics. The pre-Socratic arche ̄ was an originating, primal substance and principle that was taken to be the basis of all nature. For Thales it was water, “All is water.” For Anaximander it was apeiron. For Anaximenes it was air. Derrida’s arche-trace is the primordial trace, in its own way the origin of all thought and experience. Derrida says, The concept of the arche-trace must accede to both that necessity and that erasure. It is in fact contradictory and unacceptable within the logic of identity. The trace is not only the disappearance of origin, it would say here—in the discourse that we use and according to the trail we follow—that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except as a back-­ formation by a nonorigin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin.4

3 4

 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator’s Preface” in Of Grammatology, xxxvi.  Ibid., 66.

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The arche-trace is necessary because it initiates the first thought and the first experience. It must be understood as under erasure because to take it as a sign of a real presence is to slip into onto-theology, which is the way to a fundamental confusion about what a human life is about, what is real, what we should do, and from this confusion follow various oppressions, from oppression of one’s own self to oppression of the Other. No good, practical or moral, comes from onto-theology. This combination of necessity and non-existence seems to defy the logic of identity, but that seeming is itself, that is, the logic of identity itself, is part of the onto-theology of presence. A thing is or it is not, tertium non datur says Aristotle and the history of philosophy after him, but, in the case of the trace, it is a real phenomenon that derives from an experience of the sense of an experience that never actually was experienced. The trace is the “origin of the origin.” The trace is the origin of itself. In the middle of the last quotation there is almost a quip from Derrida when he says, “in the discourse that we use and according to the trail we follow.” The discourse he is using and the trail he is following is the discourse and trail of ‘deconstruction.’ I read it as a quip, a kind of joke, because in describing the nonexistence and the non-origin of the trace he describes a trail that he is following to arrive at that conclusion. If one of the meanings of the French trace is track, and Derrida is saying that he is following the track of the trace only to discover that the trace leaves no tracks. The metaphor he uses for this is a “wake.” Derrida describes a kind of “contortion” exercised in some texts to conceal their faux and oppressive metaphysics, an “unperceived and unconfessed metaphysics,” and he says that this attempt at concealment always leaves a “trail” (parcours). Then comes the metaphor: “That trail must leave a wake in the text.” A wake is really a remarkable phenomenon because it is a large disruption in the surface of the water, and then, after that, there is a kind of trail in the water where the large disruption occurred that can appear as a trail for hundreds of yards, and then the wake disappears altogether and there is no sign on the surface of the water of the many wakes that have crossed it. Metaphysical onto-theologies enter the world like a motorboat. Plato’s Forms, Aristotle’s ousia, Descartes’ cogito, Kant’s Ding an sich, to Heidegger’s Dasein all profoundly disrupt the surface of our philosophical reality. Derrida’s point is that these disruptions are wake-like. There is a real disruption. There is a trail that is left behind. Ultimately, however, there is nothing there and the nothing there was what was there before the metaphysical motorboat sped by. There was nothing there and it will

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return to nothing and the point was always just an attempt to claim, for an individual, for a group, a kind of mastery, a form of control, over nature, over Others, over death. The problem with these attempts at mastery, these forms of onto-­ theology, is that they are illusory. Furthermore, each form of onto-­ theology, each onto-theological theory contains within it the seeds, the counter-indications, the signs of its own falsity so that all forms of onto-­ theology are, to use a terms from the existentialists, forms of bad faith: affirming the truth of something one knows to be a lie. These lies are not just lies people are telling themselves, but are morally reprehensible lies because they are always in the service of oppression. They are always insider/outsider lies. They are always fictions about who has access to the real presence, and, more importantly, who does not. Nor can the excluded make any claims to having access to the real presence, since there is no real presence. Derrida has said in a lecture that “all deconstruction is about racism.” It is a powerful thing to say. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me, Coates describes “Americans who believe that they are white.”5 The belief in whiteness is a pure example of what Derrida calls onto-­ theology. It is the conviction that being “white” means something. It is the conviction that to be “white” is to have access to some presence to which the “nonwhite” have no access. This belief in whiteness can only be sustained in the absence of investigation, because it does not survive even a cursory investigation. It is maintained only by the strictest enforcement of a willful ignorance. It is pure bad faith. It is also about the perception of power, a perception that Simone de Beauvoir has argued is illusory. There is not real power in oppression, in being an oppressor. It is only one’s own fear that is empowered. In a way, I read the whole of Of Grammatology as a similar kind of joke to what I am saying was a kind of joke when Derrida said he was on the track of the trace. I qualify it with “a kind of a joke,” because it is not really a joke, but more a kind of play, but the kind of play that Robert Frost identifies, “play for mortal stakes.” The topic of Of Grammatology is the liberation, the recuperation, of the written word from its oppressive position as subordinate to the spoken word in the onto-theology of Western philosophy, especially as initiated in Plato’s Phaedrus where Plato explicitly argues for the aliveness of spoken words as compared to the deadness of 5

 Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 6.

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written ones. What Derrida does is to deconstruct a variety of written texts that uphold this hierarchy in which the spoken word is privileged over the written word. There is, it seems to me, a level of absurdity to this whole project that strikes me in the odd moment as quite funny. My claim is that the real topic of Of Grammatology, which is the real topic of everything Derrida writes, is not the oppression of writing, but just oppression in general, the oppression of some people by other people, perhaps most dramatically illustrated by racism or anti-semitism. Derrida’s writing about the writing of others is the standard form his technique of deconstruction most often takes. Deconstruction, for Derrida, is the deconstruction of presence. The claim of presence is the basis of the supposed superiority of speech over writing. That was Plato’s argument in Phaedrus, that in speaking with someone language is alive, it can take turns, be clarified, explanations can be given, there is presence; but writing, although it at first appears alive, turns out to be dead, unresponsive, inert, it lacks presence. Here is the famous passage from Phaedrus where Socrates explains this to Phaedrus: You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they were alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support.6

It is indeed a compelling damning of writing and paean to speech, to conversation, notably done in writing. How can Derrida disagree? Everything in that passage from Plato is complicated. It is a conversation, presence, that is written down, non-presence. To take seriously Plato’s dismissal of writing would require the dismissal of this writing, hence, the dismissal of the priority of speech over writing. Are we then to conclude that writing should take priority over speech? I would like to ask 6

 Plato, Phaedrus, 552, 275d-e.

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Plato that question in person, but that is not the question Derrida asks. Derrida makes quite a different point. “Deconstruction” is one of Derrida’s invented words. It does not mean destruction, exactly, although the destruction of texts is left in its wake. Derrida says that deconstruction is the deconstruction of presence, and then adds a dramatic flourish: “This deconstruction of presence accomplishes itself through the deconstruction of consciousness, and therefore through the irreducible notion of the trace….”7 How does Derrida get from the deconstruction of presence to the deconstruction of consciousness and what even is the deconstruction of presence or of consciousness? The clue seems to be the notion of the trace. I take it that the concept of presence and the concept of consciousness are concepts similar to the notion of the trace. That is, that they have some kind of phenomenal reality but do not exist. They cannot be destroyed, because they are real, but they can be deconstructed, because they do not exist. This deconstruction will acknowledge the phenomenal reality while making clear the ontological vacuity. All of this participates in what Derrida dramatically calls the “economy of death.”8 It is not that Derrida is trying to establish a new hierarchy with writing as superior to speech, but rather that he is trying to show that writing and speech are not that different and that attention to writing can teach us something about speech and about ourselves, something about ourselves that we mostly wish to deny, and that we deny at our peril. And this point, it seems to me, is a deeply existential point.

Derrida on Exergue and Parergon As always with Derrida, the essential fact is to be found in an apparently trivial detail. This is his fascination with the “exergue” and the “parergon,” the little detail that is not even really a part of the work, that is outside the work, i.e., “ex” or “par,” outside, “ergon,” the work, that actually draws attention to what is most important in the work. I will just note that in a way Derrida himself conceptually embodies this role of exergue or parergon, the Algerian Jew, hence doubly outside, doubly oppressed, who comes to Paris to show the truth of structuralism, the dominant philosophy of the time, the truth being that the structure 7 8

 Derrida, Grammatology, 76.  Ibid., 74.

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promised by structuralism has no internal structure, and this is done by means of deconstructing the claims to structure of structuralism. There is no there, there, in structuralism if one pays attention to the details of structuralism, and if examined carefully, one will find that the structuralists themselves know this, so that, as Derrida makes clear of one of the primary structuralist Ferdinand de Saussure, “it is to himself that Saussure must decidedly be opposed.”9 The small detail revealed in writing that speech seems to occlude and upon which the history of the heroizing of speech over writing is in denial is the fact of the spacing between words that is quite evident in writing and easily overlooked in speech. “Spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming unconscious of the subject.”10 The privileging of speech over writing, the insistence on the continuity of speech is, Derrida says, “a rather precious continuist prejudice.”11 In writing the gaps between words is evident. Between words is an abyss of non-meaning, an absence of consciousness, the unconsciousness of the subject. Derrida continues: …the unconscious is nothing without this cadence and before this caesura. This signification is formed only within the hollow of differance: of discontinuity and of discreteness, of the diversion and the reserve of what does not appear. This hinge [brisure] of language [langage] as writing, this discontinuity, could have, at any given moment within linguistics, run up against a rather precious continuist prejudice. Renouncing it, phonology must indeed renounce all distinctions between writing and the spoken word, and thus renounce not itself, phonology, but rather phonologism.12

The unconscious emerges from the gaps, from the “hollow of differance.” The “hollow of differance” functions like an environmental niche, an absence that calls forth a presence, but in this case, the presence of a non-thing, the un-conscious. The hollow is of “differance,” not just something different, the difference of one word from another, the next, but also a deferring, a deferring of meaning, and not a momentary deferring of meaning but a perpetual deferring of meaning. The “hinge of language” is the hinge of a trap door that opens between words, a trap door

 Ibid., 57.  Ibid., 74. 11  Ibid., 75. 12  Ibid. 9

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through which the consciousness drops, but also a door through which the unconscious emerges. After quoting a passage in which Roman Jakobson acknowledges that not only are there “discrete units” in written language, but there are also “discrete units” in spoken language, called “phonemes,” and that “form in language [langage] has a manifestly granular structure,” Derrida says, “The hinge [brisure] marks the impossibility that a sign, the unity of signifier and a signified, be produced within the plenitude of a present and an absolute presence. That is why there is no full speech….”13 This may seem a bit of a leap, from the idea that discrete units apply to both written language and to spoken language to the idea that there can be no unity of signifier and signified, and, apparently therefore, no plenitude of a present or an absolute presence. Once again I believe Peirce’s logic can help us find our way through this. In Peirce’s logic of thought, hence of language and of writing, Firstness precedes thought and language, Secondness engages thought and language, and Secondness can be understood as precisely the condition of being in the gap between words. In Secondness we make abductions, guesses, about what might resolve the irritation, the uncertainty that has aroused me from the quietude of Firstness. This happens, according to Peirce, for every decision we must make, for every thought we have, for every next word we come up with to say or must interpret upon hearing or reading. We anticipate what will, should, will likely, come next, but that is essentially a guess. The point then is that if the gaps are inescapable there can be no experience of presence because every word, written or spoken, is in itself only partial, waiting for its completion in a subsequent word that is itself also only partial, and so that it seems to be an inescapable aspect of language, written or spoken, that meaning is never quite given, but is always forever deferred, that from one word to the next there is a gap that is characterized by différance. I will just mention that Derrida himself acknowledges the influence and the usefulness of Peirce. He says, for example, Peirce goes very far in the direction that we have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified, which, at one time or another, would place a reassuring end to the redirection from sign to sign. We have identified logo Ibid.

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centrism and the metaphysics of presence as the exigent, powerful, systematic and irrepressible, desire for such a signified. Now Peirce considers the indefiniteness of redirection as the criterion that allows us to recognize that we are indeed dealing with a system of signs. What broaches the movement of signification is what makes its interruption impossible. The thing itself is a sign.14

I will add, on my reading of the influence of Emerson on Peirce, Derrida could have equally acknowledged the influence and usefulness of Emerson on the use of the technique of deconstruction. I have suggested that the trace is a real phenomenon, a real experience, the experience of the loss of something, say of Firstness or some pre-natal memory of our absolute connection with our mother’s body, but our translation of that experience into an onto-theology that posits the possibility, even the necessity, of a return to that original presence is an invention, an illusion, a confusion about where the meanings really are. Where then are the meanings? Derrida’s analysis suggests that there are no ultimate meanings given. Meaning itself is constantly postponed, differed, escaping from our grasp when most we clutch at it. I want to say, departing now from what Derrida says, that things are meaningful, but no meaning is given or to be found in the world. That means that meaning is only what we make of it. The basic belief of onto-theology is that meaning, presence, is out there. It requires only our appropriate approach to reveal itself to us. The idea is that if we are present to it, it will be present to us. Derrida, Emerson, and the existentialists are saying, no, there is no meaning out there. There is no way of being present so that presence, essence, will be revealed to us. There is no presence, there is no essence. There is only what we do with things. There is only what use we can make of things. The use we have with things is a reflection of our unique form of being in the world. Our unique form of being in the world is based on our unique DNA, our unique particular set of experiences, our unique way of seeing things in the world. What we find in the world serves the purpose of the expression of this uniqueness. Things are meaningful to us insofar as they can serve this purpose of ours. Meaning is not out there, we generate the meanings. Things really can be meaningful, things ARE meaningful, but only because we find them so. Meanings emerge out of a

 Ibid, 53.

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collaboration with Nature, between the NOT ME that makes it ME. And what are we doing, we are essaying. Emerson’s essay “Circles” begins with a beautiful Derridean gesture, “The eye is the first circle….” It is Derridean because its sense can only be determined if read. We need it in writing. To hear it we would have no way of determining whether the second word was “eye” or “I.” The ambiguity is also Derridean. Of course, in some sense, “I” is also meant, or, maybe, even primarily meant, but “eye” is also meant and that is given the primary status because it is secondary and would be lost altogether is not made prima facie primary. The “first circle” itself is, as I read it, Derridean. An ambiguity on the order of Kant’s “schemata.” It identifies the place where non-thing and thing meet in thought. When does “I” emerge from not “I”? Or, for that matter, when does “eye” emerge, as seeing thing, from the not “eye” of unseeing (of things) of the infant? It is a sorites, as everything is, and has within it an area of maximum ambiguity that we call the penumbra. All of Derrida’s arguments, and he does argue, he has a logic and a point to make, all of his arguments, as far as I can tell, are sorites arguments, and sorites arguments always only show that there is ambiguity where people believe there is not. The insistence on the reality of presence, the insistence that we can know without ambiguity, is just a form of Beauvoirian ‘seriousness.’ It is, as Beauvoir herself insists, motivated by fear, by a sense of vulnerability, by a desire for a kind of power that would banish fear and vulnerability. It is a form of whistling past the graveyard. That is what Derrida sees. Emerson sees it as well. The passage I have used as an epigraph to this chapter amusingly, on my reading, complicates any reading of Emerson: “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn….” If it is a “truth” then no additional circle could be drawn around it, so, if this claim is true, it is false, like the claim about the Cretan liar. Emerson consistently speaks in definitives: “Truth,” “God,” “Nature,” “Self-Reliance,” “The American Scholar,” “Experience,” “Compensation,” “Fate.” He speaks as sage, with something definitive to say on each of these weighty subjects. And yet, if you read the essays carefully, what you find is one ambiguation after another. He makes definitive claims, to be sure, but will follow every definitive claim by a counter claim that ambiguates the original claim, the way saying that the truth is that around every truth another circle of truth can be drawn.

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Is Emerson really as postmodern as Derrida? It seems impossible. And yet, consider the concept of ‘experience.’ What does Derrida, who I take to be the consummate postmodernist (along with Rorty), have to say about experience? This is what he has to say of ‘experience’ in Of Grammatology: As for the concept of experience, it is most unwieldy here. Like all the notions we are using here, it belongs to the history of metaphysics and we can only use it under erasure [sous rature]. “Experience” has always designated the relationship with presence, whether that relationship had the form of consciousness or not. At any rate, we must, according to this sort of contortion and contention to which the discourse is here obliged, exhaust the resources of the concept of experience before attaining and in order to attain, by deconstruction, its ultimate foundation.15

Can Emerson match that? Can he even approach a “deconstruction” of experience? Let us consider what is in the common consensus Emerson’s greatest essay, “Experience.” Sharon Cameron in a beautiful essay on Emerson’s “Experience,” “Representing Grief: Emerson’s ‘Experience,’” quotes part of the first paragraph of “Experience” that begins, “Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none.” Her comment on this opening is, “Perhaps the most striking part of the testament is the disavowal of the very feeling that pervades these pages. For feeling survives the complaints of its being canceled. Emerson is conceding with one part of himself what he is disputing with another.”16 Cameron refers to both Emerson’s response and the reader’s response to this as a sense of “vertigo.” ‘Vertigo’ is the feeling at once of attraction to and repulsion from some possibility. I associate it with being on a very high bridge and feeling at once attracted to the idea of jumping and repelled by the idea of jumping. It is, one might say, an emotion of maximum ambiguity. The title of the essay, “Experience,” seems to announce the definitive account of what experience is, but the reading of “Experience,” as Cameron says, leads more to a sense of vertigo than to clarity about experience. In fact, I claim, what Emerson is doing in the essay “Experience” is precisely deconstructing the concept of experience.  Ibid., 65-6.  Sharon Cameron, “Representing Grief: Emerson’s ‘Experience,’” Representations, No. 15 (Summer, 1986), 15. 15 16

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He is not destroying it or dismissing it, he is showing that the very concept of ‘experience’ is so elusive and so unspecific as to never actually be present. ‘Experience’ functions for us like a trace. It is real enough, but does not exist. There is no there, there, to experience. The experience that is the source experience for the essay “Experience” is the experience of the death of his son, Waldo, who, in the essay “Experience,” is, and this is from the poem “Experience” which is epigraph to the essay “Experience,” like “the inventor of the game,” “Omnipresent without name.” The only reference to Waldo in the essay is: “In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me.” If anything would constitute an experience one would think that the death of one’s child would be it. And yet, as strongly as he feels the grief of it, he “cannot get it nearer to me.” He compares the death of his child to the loss of an “estate” and acknowledges that the loss is an “inconvenience to me…but it would leave me as it found me.” Its presence is an absence. Its absence is what he has for a presence. “Experience,” is the title of the essay. It is a noun, a name for something, a concept, a signifier signifying, surely, something. The specific experience of “Experience,” as Cameron has suggested, is ‘grief.’ But grief turns out to be for Emerson less of a specific experience than one might hope. “The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which, we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers.”17 Whoa! A strong statement. Perhaps the strongest statement in the history of Western philosophy of the longing for presence. He seems to be saying, as explicitly as he can, that he would be willing to pay the price of the death of a loved one on order to experience, to really experience, in its absolute fullness, presence, the presence even of grief. And he has paid this price a number of times, most notably in the death of his first wife, Ellen, and the death of his first son, Waldo, but also in the loss of his father, his brothers and friends. He has paid the price and received no satisfaction. “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.”18 The tone is querulous, grief, “like all the rest” just “plays about the surface.” I take it that grief is “like all the rest” means that all experiences  Emerson, Essays, 472-73.  Ibid., 473.

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are equally surface, and, reciprocally, all experiences induce a sense of grief. The experience of grief, then becomes doubly grievous. The lament seems to be a lament at the lack of presence. Even when the worst thing we can imagine happens, we, somehow, are not there for it, and it is not there for us. Emerson sums up his thinking on this point with a powerful expression of how the world seems to him at this moment: I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricketball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.19

This is a dark assessment of our condition indeed. “Evanescence” and “lubricity” are the “most unhandsome part of our condition.” That “unhandsome,” as Cavell has remarked, is both an aesthetic assessment, no presence is unattractive, and a literal description of how reality appears to us, you can never get your hands on it. Our relations, even our most intimate relations, like that of father and son, are “oblique and casual.” I take “casual” to suggest not only not deep or strong, as in “casual acquaintance,” but also to invoke the sense of what we die from, as in “casualty.” If this is the truth of our condition, perhaps we need a lie, a lie precisely of presence. Interestingly, Emerson gives us a lie. It is a lie and a seduction that is very characteristic of great writers as far as I can tell. It is a lie about presence that great writers, great thinkers, know we long for. Early Plato gives us the Socratic aporias. Late Plato gives us the lie of presence, the story of the Forms that only the philosophers can see. We are happy, satisfied, that somebody can see them, even if we cannot. Emerson says, after a break in the text and just two and a half paragraphs later, “When virtue is in presence, all subordinate powers sleep.” There is a presence! His son may have been evanescent and lubricious, ungraspable, but there is something that can be present, virtue. I knew it. He did not really mean what he was saying about our condition. There is presence. It is a line, I want to say, that says the thing that keeps Emerson  Ibid., 473.

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popular. It gives people hope. Nor is my claim that the line is false. It is not. It just functions like Derrida’s trace. What it describes is something real that does not exist. The question that must be asked, to get at this reality that does not exist, is what does Emerson mean by “virtue.” It cannot be some kind of consistency because we know that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines”20 from “Self-Reliance.” Or maybe there is a kind of consistency that is not foolish. What we will discover, if we read “Experience” attentively, is that what Emerson has in mind for “virtue” is really what he calls “power.” In the second paragraph after the paragraph in which Emerson announces the “presence” of “virtue,” he says: “Like a bird which alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, is the Power which abides in no man and no woman, but for a moment speaks from this one, and for another moment from that one.”21 This power, very Derrideanly, is characterized by negations, “nowhere,” “in no man and no woman.” And yet it speaks. Like Derrida’s “trace,” the power is a kind of presence that is an absence, or, meaning the same thing, an absence that is a presence. The best paradigm for this idea is an environmental niche, an absence that is also a possibility, an absence that, as it were, calls forth an adaptation. “As it were” because there is no ‘calling’ being done, just an environmental pressure that makes one phenotypical characteristic more successful under particular conditions than competing ones. “Particular conditions” is just another way of saying “environmental niche,” to recall Jacob’s story of the origin of the lung. “Diverticula…appeared,” or he might as well have said, using Emerson’s vocabulary, a new circle was drawn, or, in Peirce’s language, a Firstness was disturbed by an irritation that engaged a process that sought to adapt to the irritation resulting in a Thirdness that became what we call a lung, or, for Derrida, that the trace, an absence, an environmental niche, created its own origin, made possible the development of a “lung.” An absence functions as a kind of presence that calls forth a more complicated future, which could as well be a description of what thinking is. We are on the track of the circle trace. Using Emerson’s epistemology of circles enlarges Derrida’s concept of the trace. In Emerson’s epistemology of circles there are, one might say, two fundamental types of circle traces, and a near infinity of actual circle traces. First there is the type of  Ibid., 265.  Ibid., 477.

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circle trace that is the residue, the remainder, the echo of all the past circles one has drawn for oneself. Past circles are states of understanding, including the pervading mood of that understanding, that we have moved through in the course of our lives. They are absent-presences or present absences. They are no longer present, that is no longer our present understanding or mood, but they have a lingering effect and affect upon us in our current circle, our current way of understanding the world and the pervasive mood that accompanies that understanding. To understand a person is to have some sense of these past circles, to be able to read the signs of these lingering traces of the no longer present. The other types of circle trace are the traces of circles that are yet to be drawn. They are the signs in the particular space we inhabit in a particular moment of where we may be going. Again, they are absent presences or present absences. They are a type of environmental niche. They are what Aristotle would call ‘potentialities’ that have yet to become actualities, and not all potentialities do become actualities. This, it seems to me, is an important drawing of a circle around Derrida’s notion of the trace. Derrida’s notion of the trace primarily serves deconstruction. The thing about deconstruction, the thing that Derrida does not really say about deconstruction, is that deconstruction is not destruction, Derrida does say that, but deconstruction is also construction, that is what Derrida does not say. What one discovers in reading a Derridean deconstruction of a text is a wonderful expansion of concepts one thought one understood, or maybe did not understand or did not think were so important or did not pay any attention to, and, suddenly, they become a fascinating. This, at least for me, has been my experience reading Derrida. Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ of Plato’s “pharmakon” was a revelation to me. His analysis of the ‘parergon’ in Kant’s third Critique changed how I understood what Kant was doing, and even what was most important, in the third Critique. What Derrida does with the ‘exergue’ over and over again, or the postcard, or, for that matter, with the ‘trace’ enlarge my understanding of these concepts and open up new ways, new possibilities, of thinking about these texts in general. This is a form of liberation. This is a breaking free of literal narratives that are essential expressions of metanarratives. This is a showing the way out of a fly-bottle that feels like joy. I will only remark that I could not have gotten here with respect to Derrida’s ‘trace’ without the help of Emerson’s circles, which linger in my mind even as I read the radically postmodern Derrida.

CHAPTER 10

Emerson and Heidegger: Thinking as Thanking

“Most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking.”1 —Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? “…man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man. All the facts in natural history taken by themselves have no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life.”2 —Emerson, Nature

When Heidegger says that what is most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking I hear that oft repeated phrase as ironic if not downright disingenuous. A gloss on the phrase could be, “I am thinking about thinking.” I am thinking about Heidegger and Emerson thinking about thinking. Interestingly, Heidegger never says what thinking is, although he gives a pretty good example of it in his book of lectures What Is Called Thinking? Was Heisst Denken? Was Heisst Denken can also be translated as

1  Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? translated by J.  Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1968), 4. 2  Emerson, Essays, 21.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Gilmore, Emerson as Philosopher, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32546-5_10

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What Calls for Thinking? What calls for thinking is another oft repeated question in Heidegger’s book What Calls for Thinking?. Emerson says, “man is an analogist,” by which I understand him to mean that we, human beings, think by analogies. An analogy is an interesting trope. It combines sameness with difference, unity with diversity. “This is like that” says that this is, in some sense, the same as that, and, at the same time, it says that, that is only interesting, this sameness, because this is different from that. This is a process of converting the unknown into the known, the unfamiliar into the familiar. We use what we know, have in memory, to make sense of what we encounter that we do not know. We make the unfamiliar familiar by analogy. Graham Harman compendiously explains Heidegger’s two hundred and forty-four pages of lectures (as translated by J. Glenn Gray and Fred Wieck) in What Is Called Thinking? in three pages in his book Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing. That book, which explains Heidegger’s entire philosophy from before Being and Time to his last writings in, minus the glossary and appendix, one hundred and sixty-three pages. Compendious indeed! I find Harman’s explanations quite helpful and even very accurate, yet, at the same time, I want to say that Harman gets Heidegger exactly wrong. Harman repeats Heidegger’s own oft-­ repeated phrase, “the most thought-provoking thing in our time is that we are still not thinking.” Harman goes on to say, “He claims that this remark applies to himself no less than to others, and also insists that it is not the fault of humans that they are not thinking. Being itself is to blame, just as being itself is to blame for the rampage of global technology…What is most thought provoking is being, and being always conceals itself.”3 Everything Harman says here about Heidegger seems to me exactly right, and, at the same time, exactly wrong. Heidegger certainly does say that what is most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking, and he does include himself in that description, and he does seem to want to account for this fact, he does not use the word “blame,” but he does seem to want to attribute our not thinking to something in the nature of being itself, and certainly, Heidegger does say that being “withdraws.” So what is wrong with what Harman says? What is wrong with Harman’s explanation of what Heidegger says is that, I want to say, Harman takes Heidegger at his word. Harman is not hearing 3  Graham Harman, Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing (Chicago: Open Court, 2007), 146.

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the irony that I hear in what Heidegger is saying. Heidegger is thinking even as he says that he, along with everyone else, is not thinking. He is thinking right before our very eyes. We can hear him thinking as he lectures to us about how there is still no thinking going on. The enunciated, what Heidegger has to say about thinking, is given in the enunciation, his talking about there still being no thinking. That is what thinking is. Thinking is trying to think and never quite being able to get at the thought. That is why Emerson writes essays. They are essays, and Emerson in his own way is as repetitive as Heidegger, always trying to say the same thing in words that are slightly different or have, because of a slightly different context, a slightly different intonation. When Harman says that Heidegger “blames” our still not thinking on being I take his point. There is a certain querulousness to Heidegger’s description of still not thinking because of being. But, as annoying as trying to think is, in its perpetual differing of the actual thought, the appropriate response to thinking, says Heidegger, is thanks. Heidegger is as thankful as anyone I know for his thoughts, which is to say, for being, and precisely, for being there, where he is, and able to have these thoughts, which, following Emerson, are the thoughts that Heidegger has which are prompted by the particular objects that surround him, specifically, the objects that surround his hut in the Black Forest, which are, precisely, objects of nature, in short, nature. Heidegger is happy to be there. Furthermore, Heidegger wants to share this happiness with others. He does so by standing up before them and thinking. Heidegger stands thinking before them to prompt thought in them. Everyone is thinking at a Heidegger lecture. You have to think. Everything Heidegger says, and, particularly the way he says it, provokes thought. Harman says that Heidegger says that we have to “learn” to think: “Heidegger begins by saying that we learn to think only by thinking, just as we learn to swim only by swimming.” Once again, that is certainly true. Heidegger says in What Is Called Thinking?: We shall never learn what “is called” swimming, for example, or what “calls for,” by reading a treatise on swimming. Only the leap into the river tells us what is called swimming. The question “What is called thinking?” can never be answered by proposing a definition of the concept thinking, and then diligently explaining what is contained in that definition.4 4

 Ibid., 21.

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I like everything about this example, which strikes me as quite thoughtful. First of all, I like the idea of thought as being like a river into which we leap. Thought is out there, in nature, is nature, and we leap into it. Also, as the example suggests, we do and do not ‘learn’ to think. ‘Learning’ to swim by leaping into a river is barely learning at all. One, as it were, must already know how to swim, have an instinct for swimming, to be able to stay afloat after the leap. Talking about instinct and inspiration Emerson puts it quite colorfully: “The old Hindoo Gautama says, ‘Like the loadstone is the approach of the new-born child to the breast.’ There is somewhat awful in that first approach.”5 Emerson’s “awful,” the invocation of awe, I take to be an expression of thanks. Harman identifies the “global rampage of technology” as a problem for Heidegger and indeed it is, but what is the problem that Heidegger sees in technology? Heidegger says that “The essence of technology pervades our existence….”6 What does Heidegger think the essence of technology is? Heidegger says, “the essence of technology is not anything human. The essence of technology is above all not anything technological. The essence of technology lies in what from the beginning and before all else gives food for thought.”7 This does not seem to be very helpful, but there are clues here, traces of something. One clue is that Heidegger goes immediately, in the same paragraph, from the essence of technology, as it were, to the essence of thinking: We have called thinking the handicraft par excellence.”8 Heidegger then elaborates on that idea, “Thinking guides and sustains every gesture of the hand.” To illuminate his point Heidegger contrasts the “carpenter’s craft” with men and women working with wood in a factory. The carpenter has a craft, he or she uses tools, which are forms of technology, but what the carpenter is doing is not technological. The woodworker in the factory also uses tools, machines, woodworking machines, and what they do is technological. What is the difference? Heidegger says, “Inside the factories, working men pull the same lever day and night for eight to ten hours at a stretch….” The carpenter, on the other hand, “what maintains and sustains even this handicraft is not the mere manipulation of tools, but the relatedness to wood.” Then Heidegger poses a question, “But where in  Emerson, Complete Writings, 1257.  Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, 22. 7  Ibid. 8  Ibid., 23. 5 6

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the manipulations of the industrial worker is there any relatedness to such things as the shapes slumbering within wood?”9 Good question! Let’s think about that. All of our questions about technology are now answered, I believe, with that question. There is a “relatedness” between the carpenter and the wood that does not exist for the factory wood worker. The “shapes” are in the wood, but concealed, withdrawn, aslumber. The carpenter must coax them out, stir them awake, draw them forth. To be a carpenter is to be in collaboration with the wood. To collaborate with the wood one must think with the wood, think what the wood thinks, get to know what the wood is thinking. This requires, first of all, letting the wood lie, lie before you in all its woody essence. If one allows the wood to lie before one, it will begin to disclose its woody essence. The withdrawn “shapes” will begin to come forth. The factory wood worker, on the other hand, pulls a lever. A machine grinds down the wood to whatever predetermined shape the wood is supposed to have within the logistics of technology. The factory worker experiences no “relatedness” to the wood, does not have to think the wood, does not allow the wood to lie before him or her. And, to not think the wood is not to think at all. The problem with living in an age of technology is that there is very little to think. The thinking is already preprogrammed in the technology, and that thought that the technology thinks is a monodiscourse. It has just one thought, get the job done as efficiently as possible. That is a problem of logistics. No logic is actually involved. If what I am saying is right, why does Heidegger say that “The essence of technology lies in…what gives food for thought”? (By the way, “food” does not appear in Heidegger’s German. All of the translations of the various versions of “gives us food for thought” are versions of “zu denken gibt,” ‘gives us to think.’) What ‘gives food for thought’ is what withdraws. In the first lecture Heidegger repeats this idea a number of times: “that the thing itself that must be thought about turns away from man, has turned away long ago”; “what really must be thought keeps itself turned away from man since the beginning”; “And yet man is not capable of really thinking as long as that which must be thought about, withdraws.”10 So, one way to say why technology gives food for thought is because technology “withdraws.” 9

 Ibid.  Ibid., 7.

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Heidegger’s real point about technology, however, is not that it gives food for thought, although it does give Heidegger and Heidegger’s students food for thought, but rather that it prevents thought, shuts thought down, creates a “habit” of “‘one-track thinking’”11 that is a kind of no thought. As Heidegger puts it, “the essence of technology assumes dominion—because that essence wills and therefore needs absolute univocity.”12 Technology itself has a kind of personality and its personality is to will dominance, control. Another name for this personality is ideology. It is what Lyotard is describing when he talks about the technological age, the age of capitalism. Lyotard says technology’s “power is based on its optimizing the system’s performance—efficiency.” This efficiency is enforced by “a certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be operational (that is, commensurable) or disappear.”13 “Commensurable” is a powerful word here. Factory workers are precisely commensurable in a way that a craftsperson is not. The factory worker can only think the univocal thought that the machine must be maintained in a state of maximum efficiency. This is all the sense I can make of Heidegger’s Nazism, and it is not much. Insofar as Nazism expressed a kind of nostalgia for simpler, earlier times, a time, say, before the age in which the essence of technology dominates, a time when there were tools but no technology, that is to say, no machines in factories dictating efficiency, when everyone was, essentially, a craftsperson, I can see how that idea could be attractive to Heidegger. Thinking would abound in the guidance of many hands working with, collaborating with, many different materials. On the other hand, Nazism’s will-to-dominance, the univocity of its narrative, the violence it insisted on as a response to any difference, all seem the very antithesis of letting things lie, which I take to be, more or less, the essence of Heidegger’s philosophy. To return to the idea that one must ‘learn’ to think, I suggested that thinking is more primordial to human nature than something learned, that, that was even implied in Heidegger’s example of learning what swimming is by jumping in a river. And yet, of course, there is something to the claim that one must learn to think. What I make of that claim is that one must learn what it is possible to think. One learns what it is possible to think by, primarily, reading the thoughts of the great thinkers of the past. I take it that, that is what Emerson was saying with his “representative  Ibid., 26.  Ibid. 13  Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, xxiv. 11 12

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men,” that these were examples of what people are capable of thinking. In the first set of Lectures Heidegger takes for his representative thinker Nietzsche. This clearly links Heidegger fairly directly with Emerson, since Emerson was such a formidable influence on Nietzsche. Nietzsche, I do not think it is too much to say, learned to think from Emerson. Heidegger learned to think from Nietzsche. I have learned to think from all three Emerson, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. The thought of Nietzsche’s that Heidegger dwells on in the first set of Lectures is “The wasteland grows….”14 from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I take this to be a version of, or, at least led Heidegger to think, first of all, that what is most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking, and second of all, that what accounts for that fact is that we find ourselves in the age of technology, and third of all, technology withdraws making it very hard to think, and finally, hence, we live in a thoughtless age without “relatedness” and terrorized by technology’s demand for efficiency, disconnected from all of the objects that lie before us and surround us. It is a powerful thought. In the second set of Lectures it is Parmenides to whom Heidegger turns to be provoked into thought. Heidegger begins the second set of Lectures with the recovery of the question, “What is called thinking?”15 He finds a certain ambiguity in the question itself and identifies four ways in which the question can be posed. The final of these ways Heidegger claims is the most important way of understanding the question and he poses that way as: “What is it that calls us into thinking?”16 The short answer to this question is, as Harman suggests, being. Being is what calls us into thinking. But what does that mean? What is being? Heidegger, as far as I can tell, never directly answers the question, but does find some “clues” to an answer and then uses Parmenides to think through the implications of those clues. Of clues Heidegger says, “In order to perceive a clue, we must first be listening ahead into the sphere from which the clue comes. To receive a clue is difficult, and rare—rarer the more we know, and more difficult the more we merely want to know.” I take “the sphere from which the clue comes” to refer to some mini-realm of being itself, the “sphere” echoing Emerson’s circles, we “receive” the clue echoes Emerson’s “all I know is  Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, 29.  Ibid., 113. 16  Ibid., 114. 14 15

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reception,” and finally, the receiving of clues is an elemental part of thinking, which Emerson says is, anticipating Heidegger, the most difficult thing to do. What is the clue that leads Heidegger to think? It is the similarity—in what? sound? spelling? etymology? Heidegger is not particularly clear—between the Old English words for thinking and thanking. “The Old English thencan, to think, and thancan, to thank, are closely related….” Heidegger draw a conclusion from this similarity that he poses in the form of a question: “Is thinking giving thanks?”17 That is from Lecture III of the second set of Lectures. In Lectures IV and V Heidegger thinks some thoughts about “the question of the essential nature of language”18 and about thinking as a “way”: “Thinking itself is a way.”19 Continuing that thought, Heidegger says, “we shall now try to walk the way of our question…” which recalls for me Margaret Fuller’s description of the “word walks” that she would go on with Emerson. Then in the final Lectures, Lectures VI through XI Heidegger primarily works through to what he considers a proper translation of a quotation from Parmenides. First, he gives what he calls “the usual translation,” “‘One should both say and think that Being is.’”20 “‘Being is,’” Heidegger says, “holds the most completely fulfilled secret of all thinking.” That is what we have been on the track of for this whole work, the secret of all thinking. That, I have been claiming, was always Emerson’s quest, to track down the secret of all thinking, which, for Emerson, was the secret of all Nature. For Heidegger, getting at the proper translation of “Being is” will unlock this secret of all thinking. “But,” says Heidegger, “every translation is already an interpretation.”21 I will not go very deeply into the question of interpretation except to say that, coming out of the pragmatist tradition, I think of there being better and worse interpretations, but not ‘right’ interpretations, and that the criteria for better and worse interpretations are coherence and amelioration. This puts me more on the James/Rorty side of the pragmatists than the Peirce side, but Peirce’s pervasive fallibilism makes this distinction a difference that does not make much of a difference. I read Heidegger himself to be ambiguous on this question of interpretation. His creative  Ibid., 139.  Ibid., 154 19  Ibid., 168. 20  Ibid., 171. 21  Ibid., 174. 17 18

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use of etymologies and ancient contexts for interpreting words in new ways can either be seen as trying to get it right or as trying to make space for more creative and more ameliorative interpretations. Since there is the ambiguity I prefer the latter interpretation of Heidegger’s interpretations, but I do not particularly want to resist the sense that a “better” interpretation is also closer to being the “right” interpretation, and by saying that, I only mean that there is a normative dimension to Heidegger’s interpretations, and for most interpretations. Which is to say, that there is an ‘ought’ to a better interpretation. One ought to adopt the better interpretation because it will make one’s own life better and the world a better place. That normative dimension is as much in Emerson as it is in Heidegger. Heidegger elaborates on the idea of an interpretation by saying, “Every interpretation must first of all have entered into what is said, into the subject matter it expresses.” I am not sure what the purport of that “must” is, nor do I find this very helpful, but then he says something that does seem quite helpful: “To enter into what is said in the phrase ‘being is’ remains uncommonly difficult and troublesome for the reason that we are already within it.”22 Now that is very interesting. Whatever being is, for Heidegger, we are within it. This recalls one of the major ideas that I have been attributing to Emerson and to Peirce that, in some sense, it makes more sense to say that we are in thought than that we have thoughts. Can what Heidegger means by “being” be something similar to, or even the same thing as, what Emerson and Peirce are calling “thought”? And, just as a reminder, not only are we surrounded by thought, by thoughts, but some of those thoughts we think and some of those thoughts we have not yet thought, but may think. There are configurations in the signs of the world that surrounds us in which there are patterns, unities, that we have not yet recognized. Those thoughts that surround us I have called the Peircean ‘real’ and those thoughts that surround us that we have not yet thought I have called the Lacanian ‘real,’ those potential thoughts that remain as yet unsymbolized and so unthinkable. Could Heidegger’s thinking about ‘being is’ be an affirmation of the combination of the Peircean real and the Lacanian real, within which we always already find ourselves? This makes science as much as poetry about a process of, first of all, recognizing patterns in the signs that have not been previously recognized, like Darwin recognizing the pattern among species and species  Ibid.

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differentiations that spelled out the idea ‘evolution,’ or Dante recognizing a pattern in the lives of people all around him, of people making their own hells as well as heavens and dwelling therein. People send signs that say ‘friend,’ as well as signs that say, ‘watch out!’ and it may take some time for those signs to come together for us in a coherent pattern. They may be a Peircean real, but as yet also a Lacanian real. There is always a Lacanian real. There are always more signs to read that have not yet been read, some not yet by us, some not yet by anyone. As Emerson says in “Circles,” “there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable.”23 I would only add that the residuum is unknown and unanalyzable only so far as it remains unsymbolized, unthought. Once it is thought it can be known, better and better, and analyzed, more and more completely. And, again following Emerson, we think by analogizing, finding among different things sameness. Memory, what Heidegger says “gathers,”24 by which I understand, gathers into a pattern, a familiar pattern by which we can recognize unfamiliar patterns, provides the ability to recognize the same in what is different, not ‘identical,’ as Heidegger insists, but the ‘same.’ Analogy is precisely this combination of the different and the same. It is how we think, how we are able to think new thoughts. Very beautifully Emerson says, weirdly enough in “Demonology,” “Secret analogies tie together the remotest part of Nature, as the atmosphere of a summer morning is filled with innumerable gossamer threads running in every direction, revealed by the beams of the rising sun!”25 One has to be in the right place at the right time to ‘see’ what is otherwise invisible, unknown, unanalyzable. Heidegger, in his final lecture, not just of this two-year series of lectures, but of his life, gives his final translation of Parmenides’ phrase, “usually” translated as “One should both say and think that Being is.” In this final lecture he is still working on the question “What is called thinking.” He reformulates the question in terms of ‘signs’ of thinking: “what does this word ‘thinking’ signify? We learned it signifies memory, thanks, thinking that recalls.” Then he considers the phenomenon of judging as thinking and finds judging to be a combination of the Greek words λέγειννν and νοείν which Heidegger translates as “letting-lie-before-us and (the) taking-to-heart.” So that Heidegger says, “Accordingly, what is called  Emerson, Essays, 406.  Heidegger, Thinking, 3. 25  Emerson, Complete Emerson, 949. 23 24

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thinking is, properly, letting-lie-before-us and so taking-to-heart also….”26 This is the idea of “allowing disclosure” that I discussed earlier with respect to Beauvoir, who actually gets the idea from Heidegger. “Letting-­ lie-­ before-us” is the opposite of trying to grasp, control, dominate. “Taking-to-heart” is a kind of attentiveness to what emerges once one allows something or someone to ‘let-lie-before-us.’ “But,” says Heidegger, “it turned out that this definition of thinking is far from adequate.”27 What is missing is “That which directs us into thinking,” “That which calls on us to think,” which he also refers to as “It.” The “That” and the “It” are, of course, being. His final statement about what is called thinking is given in the second to last paragraph of his lectures and book What Is Called Thinking: …the essential nature of thinking is determined by what there is to be thought about: the presence of what is present, the Being of beings. Thinking is thinking only when it recalls in thought the έόν [Being], That which this word indicates properly and truly, that is, unspoken, tacitly. And that is the duality of beings and Being. This quality is what properly gives food for thought. And what is given, is the gift of what is most worthy of question.28

I am not sure Heidegger means it so, but I read this “duality of beings and Being” as dialectical. I read it as a restatement of Emerson’s ME and NOT ME. As I have argued, I read Nature as beginning with the distinction between the ME and the NOT ME where the ME is virtually an extensionless point and the NOT ME is everything in the world, even his own body, but that Nature ends with just the opposite relation between the ME and the NOT ME where the ME is the whole world as I perceive it and the NOT ME is a virtual extensionless point of the unsymbolized Lacanian real. Thinking, for Emerson, is precisely the conversion of, in the latter relation, the NOT ME into the ME, and this accomplished via analogizing. The repeated translation in the Gray/Wieck translation of What Is Called Thinking?, a translation, I will add, done in consultation with Heidegger, is the translation of versions of “zu denken gibt” as versions of  Ibid., 230.  Ibid. 28  Ibid., 244. 26 27

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“gives food for thought.” Although the reference to food is not in the original, I like this translation and it recalls for me Aristotle’s account of nutrition. Aristotle discusses nutrition in Book 4 of De Anima (On the Soul). Nutrition is an activity of the soul that Aristotle directly links with understanding and perception. All three processes of the soul, understanding, perception, and nutrition, are, in their most general form, the same process, just with different objects. So, says Aristotle, “we must…begin by determining the objects corresponding to nutrition, sense, and understanding.”29 The process, in its most general form, is the conversion of potentiality into actuality. In typical Aristotle fashion, Aristotle considers a puzzle that arises in the way people talk about nutrition that he then goes on to clarify. The puzzle is that some people say that “like grows by like” whereas others say that “contrary nourishes contrary.”30 Aristotle resolves this puzzle as follows: It matters for this question whether nourishment is the first or last thing added. Perhaps it is both, if undigested nourishment is added first, and digested nourishment last. If so, then it would be possible to speak of nourishment in both ways; for insofar as nourishment is undigested, contrary nourishes contrary, and insofar as it has been digested, like nourishes like. Evidently, then, each view is in a way both correct and incorrect.31

Now that is some thinking! Aristotle sums up his description of nourishment by saying, “Hence this sort of principle in the soul is a potentiality of the sort that preserves the ensouled thing, insofar as it is ensouled, and nourishment equips it for its actuality….”32 What I understand Aristotle to be describing in this section on nutrition is precisely how the NOT ME becomes the ME. The NOT ME in this case are potentialities that surround us, potentialities for perception, potentialities for understanding, and potentialities for nutrition. These potentialities start out as NOT ME, not seen or understood or eaten and it is the soul’s work to convert these potentialities into the ME. This recalls for me Emerson’s quotation of the Gautama, “Like the approach of the iron to the lodestone is the approach of the new-born child to the breast.” 29  Aristotle, De Anima, 415a20 in Aristotle, Introductory Readings translated by Terence Irwin and Gail Fine (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 86. 30  Ibid., 416a30. 88. 31  Ibid., 416b4-9, 89. 32  Ibid., 416b17-20, 89.

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That is, we have a hunger for these conversions and this hunger is as natural to us as magnetism is to iron and lodestone. This is what I understand Heidegger to mean by “the call” of being. Just as the situation of fish in low-oxygen “calls” forth diverticula in the esophagi of the fish and the lodestone “calls” to the iron, so the signs that surround us in the world call to us to perceive and eat and think. That is what it means to have a human soul in Nature. Emerson says in “Fate,” “Fate is unpenetrated causes.”33 He also says, “But every jet of chaos which threatens to exterminate us is convertible by intellect into wholesome force.”34 A thought for which I am extremely thankful.

 Emerson, Essays, 958.  Ibid.

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CHAPTER 11

Conclusion: A Brief Reading of “Fate”: Thinking about “Fate” after Cavell, Bloom, and Rorty

“To me, however, the question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall we live?” 1 —Emerson, “Fate” “The way of Providence is a little rude.”2 —Emerson, “Fate”

I love the litotes of “The way of Providence is a little rude.” True enough. It makes me laugh to say it so. Still, there is the question, how we shall I live? It is a practical question and Emerson has some practical advice to give to us, although it is a little hard to find it in an essay like “Fate.” Cavell devoted two long essays to readings of “Fate” and they are strong readings. By “strong” I mean that no one would have thought to read “Fate” the way Cavell reads “Fate” before Cavell provided his own readings of “Fate.” In both essays Cavell identifies as a central topic of the essay a topic that is not actually or explicitly raised in the essay itself. In Cavell’s first essay on “Fate,” “Emerson, Coleridge, Kant (Terms and Conditions),” Cavell finds in “Fate” a response to two Kantian issues, the issue of Kant’s two worlds and the issue of Skepticism, both of which Cavell reads Emerson perceiving as problems for which he, Emerson, has 1 2

 Ibid., 943.  Ibid., 945.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Gilmore, Emerson as Philosopher, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32546-5_11

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a solution, a solution that engages Coleridge’s romanticism. That is a fairly lame gloss on a fascinatingly complicated essay, but the point is that neither Kant not Coleridge is ever mentioned in the essay, nor is Kant’s doctrine of the two worlds nor his solution to skepticism. In the second essay, “Emerson’s Constitutional Amending: Reading “Fate,” Cavell reads the central topic of “Fate” to be addressing the institution of slavery in the United States at the time of his writing “Fate,” which was in the early 1850s, pre–Civil War. Again, although the words “slave” and “slavery” occur in the essay, no mention is made of the institution of slavery in the United States, nor any explicit commentary on that institution. Can he, Cavell, do that? Or, perhaps the better question is, what is he doing? Harold Bloom says, “As I grow older, I find Emerson to be strongest in the essays of The Conduct of Life, published in late 1860.”3 The Conduct of Life, which Bloom also calls Emerson’s “last great book,”4 is the book in which the essay “Fate” is to be found. Bloom gives us a warning about Emerson. He says, “Much as I love Emerson, it is important to remember always that he valued power for its own sake. If he is a moral essayist, the morality involved is not primarily either humane or humanistic.”5 This strikes me as a very puzzling, even paradoxical, thing to say. How can a morality not be humane or humanistic? Writing can certainly be not humane or humanistic, but then it would not be moral. I agree that Emerson was always concerned with power, but is not real power, as well as real freedom, as I have argued Beauvoir argues and Emerson recognizes, tied up with morality? In the lovely, autobiographical essay “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” Richard Rorty confesses to a childhood project that he will later abandon. “At fifteen,” he says, his project was to “reconcile Trotsky and the orchids,” which he loved. He refers to a phrase from Yeats that he says thrilled him, to “‘hold reality and justice in a single vision.’”6 Rorty later comes to realize that, that project is not doable. He says, “So I decided to write a book about what intellectual life might be like if one could manage to give up the Platonic attempt to hold reality and justice in a single vision.”7 The  Harold Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, 194.  Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Riverhead Books, 1994), 256. 5  Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, 194. 6  Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 7. 7  Ibid., 13. 3 4

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book he writes is Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. He says that in that book he argues that there is no need to weave one’s personal equivalent of Trotsky and one’s personal equivalent of my wild orchids together. Rather, one should try to abjure the temptation to tie in one’s moral responsibilities to other people with one’s relation to whatever idiosyncratic things or persons one loves with all one’s heart and soul and mind (or, if you like, the things or persons one is obsessed with). The two will, for some people, coincide— as they do in those lucky Christians for whom the love of God and of other human beings are inseparable, or revolutionaries who are moved by nothing save their thought of social justice. But they need not coincide, and one should not try too hard to make them do so.8

There is a bit of irony in there in the reference to the “lucky Christians,” since Rorty is a famous atheist who thinks religion is well-lost, although it is probably a complex irony, on the order of Socratic irony, so that Rorty probably does mean that they would be lucky if they could indeed find the love of God and the love of other people inseparable, although, in experience, that is actually quite unusual in fact if not in avowal. But what really interests me in this passage is the “should” or, more accurately, the “should not.” Is that a practical “should,” a pragmatic “should” (which is a little different from a practical “should”), or a moral “should”? My sense is that it is a bit of all three. But if there is some sense of a moral “should” in there, then that would seem to undermine the very thing that he seems to want to say, which is that what we feel morally responsible for and what we love need not be reconcilable, and, furthermore, we should not try to reconcile them. Again, this seems puzzling, if not downright paradoxical. How are we to unravel the strands? Rorty, in an essay entitled “Is Derrida a Transcendental Philosopher?,” identifies two ways of reading Derrida which are really two ways of reading anybody. Rorty says, “one can say that there is a quarrel between those of us who read Derrida on Plato, Hegel and Heidegger in the same way as we read Bloom or Cavell on Emerson or Freud—in order to see these authors transfigured, beaten into fascinating new shapes—and those who read Derrida to get ammunition, and a strategy, for the struggle to bring social change.” Rorty describes the latter readers as reading Derrida as a  Ibid.

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“transcendental philosopher.”9 This is the fundamental dichotomy that pervades all of Rorty’s work, but I would say also all of Emerson’s work. Either you are a transcendentalist, a ‘modernist,’ which means you think that there is some kind of access to some kind of transcendent reality that can provide some kind of absolutely certain knowledge, not just about the world, as in the case of science, but, perhaps even more importantly, about morality and justice; or, you are a pragmatist, a liberal ironist, to add my own terms, an Emersonian and a postmodernist, and you think that all anybody ever does with anything is use it, that there is no access to a transcendent reality to ground any knowledge as Truth, not in science and not in morality. It seems pretty clear that Rorty thinks one “should” be the latter, but what does this “should” amount to given what the latter actually thinks about truth and morality? How will we read if we read like the latter? We will read every text the way Bloom or Cavell read Emerson or Freud “to see these authors transfigured, beaten into fascinating new shapes.” That is an interesting combination of metaphors. “Transfigured” suggests the holy transfiguration of Christ, something earthly transformed into something divine. ‘Beaten into a new shape,’ even as qualified by “fascinating,” sounds pretty violent. Does Rorty mean both? I think he does. What he means, I think, is something along the lines of what Bloom means when he says that “If he [Emerson] is a moral essayist, the morality involved is not primarily either humane or humanistic.” Everything, as Emerson says, has two handles. Humane and humanistic have two handles. One handle is the ready-made value version, the, say, Christian version, of humane and humanistic, and by that handle, Emerson is not humane or humanistic. But there is, as there always is, another handle. It is the handle that maximizes power and freedom. If morality is not tied to some transcendent truth, some transcendent Form of Justice, then what else could morality be about but power and freedom, maximizing power and freedom, not just for oneself, which is, as Beauvoir argues and Emerson acknowledges, a paltry conception of power and freedom, but a general maximizing of power and freedom for everyone? That is precisely the morality of the liberal ironist, who wants to ameliorate suffering and empower creative thinking.

9  Richard Rorty, “Is Derrida a Transcendental Philosopher?” in Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 120.

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Ameliorating suffering and empowering creative thinking is a beautiful, almost divine, undertaking, but not without its violence. We see the violence in the reaction of “All lives matter” to “Black lives matter.” We see the violence in the resistance of Ukraine to the Russian invasion. We see the violence in the surfeit of refugees on the United States borders and around the world. The way of Providence, as Emerson says, is a little rude. Cavell does violence to Emerson’s essays in his readings of them. He does not ‘read’ them so much as re-write them. As with his mistaken memories of the films he interprets, if he gets the films wrong, so much the worse for the films, if Emerson did not say what Cavell wants him to say, so much the worse for Emerson. I do not think that there is any getting a film or an Emerson essay ‘right.’ The only morality to apply to a Cavell reading of an Emerson essay, it seems to me, is the liberal ironist morality. Does Cavell, in his reading of the essay, contribute to the ameliorating of suffering and the empowerment of creative thinking? My own answer to that question is an unequivocal ‘yes!’ but that will not be the answer everyone will give, especially modernist transcendentalists. Interestingly, to me anyway, Emerson, so often taken for a transcendentalist, does give a quite equivocal evaluation of the transcendentalists in his essay “The Transcendentalist.” He consistently refers to them as “they” instead of identifying with them as a “we.” He does not damn them, but there is a persistent note of slight ridicule, “They are lonely, the spirit of their writing and conversation is lonely; they repel influences; they shun general society; they incline to shut themselves in their chamber in the house, to live in the country rather than in town, and to find their tasks and amusements in solitude.”10 Later he says, I believe derisively, “So many promising youths, and never a finished man!”11 The fundamental dialectic of “Fate” is the dialectic of fate and freedom. Which is the big philosophical question: Is there freedom of the will for human beings? Fate is Nature’s power over us, freedom is our power over Nature. Emerson begins with an analysis of fate, “the snap of the tiger and other leapers…—expensive races,—race living at the expense of race.”12 That latter interpreted, brilliantly to my mind, by Cavell as a reference to the institution of slavery in the United States.13 Then there is a turn in the  Emerson, Essays, 200.  Ibid., 201. 12  Emerson, Essays, 945. 13  Cavell, Etudes, 196. 10 11

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essay, as there always is, always many turns, but some bigger than others, “But,” says Emerson, “Fate has its lord; limitation its limits; is different seen from above and from below; from within and from without.” I will just mention that, that anticipates Thomas Nagel’s analysis of freedom of the will in his essay “Moral Luck.” Nagel makes the distinction between “acts” and “events,” which is just the distinction that Emerson is making when speaking of seeing things “from within and from without.” “Acts” are what we do when perceived from within, “events” what people do when perceived from without. On Nagel’s reading, we cannot not take the view from within, although he concludes that the only ultimately responsible view is the view from without. We cannot not take the internal view because of our emotional responses to what we do/what happens to us: Guilt and indignation, shame and contempt, pride and admiration are internal and external sides of the same moral attitudes. We are unable to view ourselves simply as portions of the world, and from inside we have a rough idea of the boundary between what is us and what is not, what we do and what happens to us, what is our personality and what is an accidental handicap.14

That last part, the reference to our sense of what is us and not us sounds a lot like Emerson’s ME and NOT ME. “But,” Nagel concludes, …it is not enough to say merely that our basic moral attitudes toward ourselves and others are determined by what is actual; for they are also determined by the sources of that actuality, and by the external view of action which forces itself on us when we see how everything we do belongs to a world that we have not created.15

I understand Nagel to be arguing for moral luck and our complete subsumption under fate, that we will have to acknowledge if we are honest with ourselves. I take it that Nagel’s own moral imperative here is that people tend to be morally judgmental of other people and they probably should not be, no more for their moral approval than for their moral disapproval. I appreciate Nagel’s impulse, but find that his analysis falls under 14  Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” in Mortal Questions (New York: University of Cambridge Press, 1979), 38. 15  Ibid.

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what Emerson calls the “scientistic.” Does Emerson have a better analysis? I believe so, by which I mean, of course, more useful. Emerson associates freedom with thought: “The revelation of Thought takes man out of servitude into freedom.”16 What follows is a complicated conjunction of claims, all of which should sound familiar to a reader of Emerson, that prepare the reader for where Emerson will ultimately go on the question of freedom of the will. I will tie these claims to things I have argued for in relation to Emerson in relation to other thinkers. Emerson says, “We rightly say of ourselves, we were born, and afterward we were born again, and many times.” This is, of course, a New Testament idea, but it is also what Deleuze and Guattari are arguing for as the possibility that can save us, the continual return to the BwO, the body without organs that is the attitude of maximum potential, maximum expectancy, the egg form, the vesicle form. “The day of days, the great day of the feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to the Unity in things, to the omnipresence of law;—sees that what is must be, and ought to be, or is best.” The “feast of life” recalls for me the experience that Octavio Paz call “fiesta,” and that we ‘see’ the law Peirce’s idea that in abduction we literally ‘see’ the patterns that surround us, just as the beaver ‘sees’ the place to make the dam. To reinforce this Peircean reading Emerson says, “It is not in us so much as we are in it.” This might very well be the originating statement for Peirce’s idea that we are in thought. Finally, and most significantly for my purposes of interpretation: “We are lawgivers; we speak for Nature; we prophesy and divine.” 17 We are ‘in’ law AND we give law. There is some tension there and a vaguely Kantian sound which need to be explored. The key to our freedom, for Emerson, is thought, but how and what that means still remains a little vague. “Thought dissolves the material universe by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic.”18 Thought is a menstruum, a dissolver of solidities in favor of ideas by means of an ascent, but how do we ascend. The ascent is via dialectic, but there remains to explain how the dialectic actually works. Emerson adds to thought another variable in our freedom: “If thought makes us free, so does the moral sentiment.” This moral sentiment is also associated, as Bloom insists, with power: “the moral sentiment cannot choose but  Emerson, Essays, 954-5.  Ibid., 955. 18  Ibid., 956. 16 17

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believe in unlimited power.”19 This could be a gloss on Kant. Morality, for Kant, requires freedom, and freedom for Kant, as it does for Emerson, entails power. This leads Kant into a famous “circle.” In order to be moral, we must be free. The only way we can be free, that is, independent of the causal chain of nature, is if we are moral. If we can act freely, then we can act morally, but the question that Kant poses is, can we act freely? Kant perfectly well sees the problem. In order to act freely we must be able, as it were, to step outside the causal chain of nature. It is science that has discovered the causal chain of nature and Kant is a believer in and an upholder of science. Kant’s resolution of the problem, his way into the “circle”20 of morality and freedom is the Ding an sich, the thing-in-itself, and the two worlds that the thing-in-itself implies. For Kant, we inhabit either the phenomenal world of nature, in which case we act on hypothetical imperatives and are not free. Or, we inhabit the noumenal world, give the law to ourselves via reason and the categorical imperative and we are free as well as moral. Tertium non datur. That is a lot of metaphysics to account for our freedom and power in the world. That is why it is called Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Emerson has a simpler solution. You could call it, a simpler vocabulary, or, following Rorty, a redescription.

From tertium non datur to tertium datur “Fate” ends with a paean to what Emerson calls the “Beautiful Necessity.” What is this “Beautiful Necessity”? He begins by saying, “One key, one solution to the mysteries of human condition, on solution to the old knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge, exists, the propounding, namely, of the double consciousness.”21 Here Emerson associates the double consciousness with “the two horses of his private and his public nature,” but it could also refer to the view from the internal perspective versus the view from the external perspective, or even the idea of the ME and the NOT ME. He refers to the circus rider who rides both horses, sometimes alternatingly and sometimes simultaneously. He refers to a “daemon who suffers” and “the Deity who secures universal benefit.” He says, quite  Ibid., 956-7.  Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals translated by Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1959), 68. 21  Emerson, Essays, 966. 19 20

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beautifully, “the indwelling necessity plants the rose of beauty on the brow of chaos, and discloses the central intention of Nature to be harmony and joy.” 22 It is a beautiful restatement, or original statement, of Beauvoir’s description that if you allow disclosure, things will disclose to you the nature of their being. It is what it is to think, to allow disclosure and to attend to what discloses itself. It is what Heidegger is describing when he describes the authentic woodworker’s “relation” to the wood. We are surrounded by traces of the unsymbolized that, as it were, call to us to think them into reality, into thought into symbolic form. This is a collaboration between us and Nature. The double consciousness resolves itself into a third thing, a thinking thing. In the process of thinking we are in the process of transforming the world’s potential into our own actual which can become the actual for other as well. We are walking khôra, receptacles, schemata, transition spaces, chiasmus, movements between extremes of difference, difference between the ME and the NOT ME, between sexual difference of female and male, between past me and prospective me, past us and prospective us as a community. The last line of “Fate” sums this up: “law rules throughout existence, a Law which is not intelligent but intelligence,—not personal nor impersonal,—it disdains words and passes understanding; it dissolves persons; it vivifies nature; yet solicits the pure in heart to draw on all its omnipotence.” Nature solicits us, that is what Heidegger means by ‘that which calls for thought,’ and we can respond to that call by thinking, thinking which is a collaboration with Nature that will feel like a fiesta and end in joy. The dialectic of fate and freedom is the over-arching theme of Stephen Whicher’s book Freedom and Fate, the title of which, somewhat ironically to my mind, inverts the actual order of Emerson’s presentation of those themes in the essay “Fate.” The inversion is in the optative mood, which is reasonable enough for a reader of Emerson. I interpret Whicher affirming freedom over fate, having priority, for Emerson and in Nature, at least in the human being, over fate. It is a strategy, to privilege one side of the dialectic over the other. My own sense is that Emerson only privileges one side of the dialectic in a partial mood, but in his most expansive moods, always affirms the third thing that emerges, that he knows will emerge because it always has. At the end of his book Whicher is lamenting the critics of Emerson who seem to dismiss him altogether, like Yvor Winters and T.  S. Eliot. The last line of Whicher’s book is “To reject Emerson  Ibid., 967.

22

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utterly is to reject mankind.”23 It is a sentiment with which I am sympathetic, but with which I do not completely agree. It is too weak for me as a defense of the value of Emerson. My argument in this work has been that Emerson is funny, playful, emotionally deep, intellectually expansive, operating at the very highest level of human intentionality, and, most important of all, extremely useful in this, as Cornell West puts it, “our postmodern moment.”24

 Whicher, Freedom and Necessity, 173.  West, American Evasion, 4.

23 24

Index

A Aesthetic, 26, 110, 180 Analogy, 6, 7, 13, 34, 41, 52, 104, 123, 184, 192 Anamorphosis, 112 Anaximander, 96–98, 107, 169 Anaximenes, 169 Anderson, Douglas, 160 Aristophanes, 41, 85, 168 Aristotle, 12, 18, 33, 40, 60, 66, 97, 98, 137, 170, 182, 194 Arsić, Branka, 3, 8 Austin, John, 19 B Bad faith, 28, 29, 51, 171 Bailey, Austin, 3, 142, 143 Beautiful, 10, 24, 25, 30, 32, 38, 41, 45, 54, 58, 60, 61, 70, 99, 108, 122, 134, 158, 162, 177, 179, 201, 205 Beauvoir, Simone de, viii, 10, 28, 33–56, 96, 132, 133, 147, 171, 177, 193, 198, 200, 205

Being, 5, 6, 10, 18, 22–25, 27–29, 34–36, 40–46, 48–51, 54, 55, 58, 66, 71, 72, 75, 76, 79, 81–87, 96, 99, 102, 103, 106, 108, 110, 111, 122–124, 128, 129, 133, 134, 139, 142, 147, 148, 151–156, 166, 168, 169, 171, 173, 175, 176, 178, 181, 183–186, 189–193, 195, 199, 205 Belief, 29, 33, 34, 37, 42, 45, 48, 76, 82, 127, 128, 137, 156, 171, 176 Borges, Jorge Luis, 116, 117 Bow and Lyre, The, 136 Brown, Lee Rust, 3 C Cameron, Sharon, 3, 10, 83, 178, 179 Capitalism, 5, 30, 69, 71, 82, 85, 90, 132, 133, 188 Carlin, George, 56, 60

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Gilmore, Emerson as Philosopher, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32546-5

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208 

INDEX

Cavell, Stanley, 1–4, 8, 9, 12, 13, 18–24, 31, 40, 61, 66, 71, 83, 96, 109, 110, 112, 114, 151, 152, 180, 197–206 Chiasmus, 12, 131, 138, 141, 143, 145, 147–150, 152, 154–157, 159–163, 205 Christian/Christianity, 30, 199, 200 Civil War, 58–60 Clutching, 83, 109, 110, 163 Coates, Ta Nehisi, 171 Cohen, Leonard, 103, 143 Comic, 38–41, 43, 53–56 Conformity, 5, 7, 30, 51, 55, 71, 74, 78, 79, 104, 153 Connell, George, 52 Courbet, Gustave, 41 Critias, 138 D Dante, 39, 192 Darwin, Charles, 108, 122, 124, 125, 191 Deacon, Terrence, 125 Deleuze, Gilles, viii, 13, 86–90, 92, 203 Derrida, Jacques, viii, 7, 13, 75, 162, 165–182, 199 Descartes, René, 19, 60, 137, 163, 170 Dewey, John, 57, 58, 66, 77, 82 Dialectic, 7–9, 18, 30, 38, 39, 42, 52–55, 97, 101, 113, 121, 126–135, 138, 154, 155, 160, 161, 201, 203, 205 Dickenson, Emily, 112 Différance, 165–167, 175 Dilworth, David, 30 Diotima, 155, 157–159, 161 Disclosure, 49, 205

Duck/rabbit, 40, 43, 98, 112, 142 Dunbar, Robin, 156, 157 Dunston, Susan, 3, 134 E Ecstasy, 29, 32, 43, 71, 88, 99, 100, 130, 136 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, vii, viii, 1–13, 17–62, 65–92, 95–143, 145–163, 165–195, 197–206 “American Scholar, The,” 3, 7, 17, 26, 67, 84, 85, 104, 131, 134, 135, 148, 177 “Art,” 50 “Circles,” 10, 13, 34, 62, 73, 89, 97, 166 “Compensation,” 10, 99, 177 Conduct of Life, 198 “Fate,” 9, 87, 98, 100, 177, 195, 197, 198, 201, 202, 204, 205 “Inspiration,” 136, 186 “Intellect,” 104, 132, 138, 163 “Method of Nature, The,” 29, 146, 150 Nature, 7, 22, 26, 31, 38, 39, 41, 54, 69, 70, 85, 92, 123, 131, 136, 145, 193 “Napoleon: Or, The Man of the World,” 134 “Natural History of the Intellect, The,” 22, 24, 25, 31, 114, 116 “Nominalist and Realist,” 5, 13, 27, 97, 99, 123, 124, 126, 166 “Philosophy of the People,” 58 “Plato: Or, The Philosopher,” 138 Representative Men, 31, 188–189 “Self-Reliance,” 4, 10, 51, 77–79, 98, 104, 177, 181 “Sphinx, The,” 12, 26, 27

 INDEX 

“Uses of Great Men,” 31 Empedocles, 107, 108 Enunciated/enunciation, 9, 11, 100, 101, 185 Epictetus, 52, 84 Erotic, 32, 40 Esotericism, 4, 7 Ethics of Ambiguity, The, 34, 42, 46, 48 Evolution, 107, 118, 121, 125, 126, 192 Exergue, 165, 173–182 Existential/existentialism, 21–23, 42, 70, 75, 119, 121–143 F Fallibilism, 28, 33, 73, 82, 83, 112, 190 Fann, K. T., 141 Fiedler, Leslie, 100 Fiesta, 121, 127, 129–135, 143, 203, 205 Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness, 9, 33, 37, 97, 103, 111, 120, 137, 142, 162, 167–169, 175, 176, 181 Fourier, Jean-Baptiste Joseph, 145 Freud, Sigmund, 60, 61, 68, 71, 96, 150, 155–157, 199, 200 Frost, Robert, 52–56, 130, 171 Fuller, Margaret, 162, 190 G Gender, 5, 45, 46, 77, 146, 147 Genius, vii, 51, 78, 80, 81, 163 Gorgias, 6, 48, 67 Goya, 129, 130, 132 Grammatology, 166

209

H Haddock Seigfried, Charlene, 145 Haldane, J. B. S., 125 Hamlet/Hamlet, 112, 117 Harman, Graham, 184–186, 189 Health, 6, 92, 127 Heidegger, Martin, viii, 19, 20, 98, 146, 168, 170, 183–195, 199, 205 Heraclitus, 96, 97, 123, 128, 129, 135 Hubris, 5 Humor, 36, 38–41, 52–56, 161 I Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 41 Intentionality, 143, 156, 157, 160, 163, 206 Irigaray, Luce, viii, 7, 145–163 J Jacob, François, 110, 125, 181 Jakobson, Roman, 175 James, Henry Sr., 30, 31 James, William, 66, 71, 72, 82, 190 Jardin des Plantes, 12, 22, 24, 25, 30, 32, 122 Jokes, 36, 38–40, 54, 56, 60, 95, 119, 170, 171 Joy, vii, 4, 23, 39, 43, 45, 47, 71, 72, 88, 90, 98, 100, 132, 150, 182, 205 Justice, 6, 68, 71, 72, 77, 99, 146, 198–200 K Kafka/Kafkaesque, 114–120 Kant, Immanuel, 12, 19, 30, 38, 39, 60, 140, 141, 143, 170, 177, 182, 197, 198, 204

210 

INDEX

Khôra, 12, 131, 139, 141, 162, 205 Kierkegaard, Søren, 42, 96, 117 Kuhn, Thomas, 77 L Labyrinth, 121, 127–135, 143, 161–163 Labyrinth of Solitude, The, 121, 128 Lambert, Gregg, 12, 13 Lincoln, Abraham, 58 Logic, 9, 37, 88, 91, 92, 97, 137, 169, 170, 175, 177, 187 Love, vii, viii, 25, 29–31, 46, 47, 50, 70, 110, 119, 126, 149, 152, 155, 158, 159, 197–199 Lyotard, Jean-François, 5, 65, 66, 68, 83, 188 M Marx, Karl, 68, 69, 71, 85, 96 Matthiessen, F. O., 71, 100 Menken, H. L., 100 Menstruum, vii, 104, 203 Metanarratives, 5, 7, 59, 68, 69, 83, 146, 182 Metaphysics, 2, 11, 74, 75, 101, 122, 123, 158–160, 167, 170, 176, 178, 204 Modernism, 65–67, 146 Moi, Toril, 153, 155, 156 Moral perfectionism, 9 Morality, 57, 77, 166, 198, 200, 201, 204 Musement, 105 N Natural, 21, 22, 25, 29–31, 41, 82, 110, 116, 117, 122, 125, 126, 134, 143, 150, 161, 183, 195

Nature/Nature, 3, 8, 13, 21, 22, 24–31, 34–42, 51, 54, 60–62, 69–76, 79, 81, 82, 84, 86, 89, 95–126, 130–132, 134–139, 141–143, 145, 146, 148, 151, 152, 159, 160, 163, 165, 169, 171, 177, 179, 180, 184–186, 188, 190, 192, 193, 195, 201, 203–205 Nazism, 188 Nietzsche, Friedrich, viii, 13, 19, 30, 68, 71, 72, 78, 79, 96, 123, 161–163, 189 O Obscurity, 4, 7, 71 Of Grammatology, 165–167, 171, 172, 178 Oliver, Mary, 8 Onto-theology, 165–168, 170, 171, 176 Oppression, 4, 6, 10, 48–50, 77, 147, 170–172 P Packer, Barbara, 3, 9 Parergon, 173–182 Parmenides, 67, 189, 190, 192 Paz, Octavio, 7, 121–143, 161, 162, 203 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 4, 9, 11, 12, 23, 24, 26–28, 30, 31, 33–56, 60, 66, 82, 97, 98, 105–108, 114–116, 118, 119, 123, 125, 137, 141–143, 154, 162, 167, 169, 175, 176, 181, 190, 191, 203 Performative, 24, 37, 72 Personality, 43, 106–108, 114, 118–120, 166, 188, 202

 INDEX 

Philosopher, vii, viii, 3, 4, 7, 11, 12, 17–32, 35, 38, 57, 59, 69, 72, 74, 75, 95, 96, 116, 161, 168, 180, 181 Philosophy, vii, viii, 1–13, 17–24, 30, 31, 40, 42, 52, 53, 57–62, 67, 70, 72–84, 95–120, 136, 137, 157, 158, 167, 168, 170, 171, 173, 179, 180, 184, 188 Plato, vii, 6, 12, 17, 18, 20, 21, 26, 28, 34, 40, 41, 48, 60, 66, 72, 75, 85, 97, 98, 137–139, 141, 143, 155, 157–162, 166, 168, 170–173, 180, 182, 199 Plutarch, 54 Polarity, 8, 9, 82, 84, 91, 92, 95, 100, 114, 138, 147–151 Porte, Joel, 2 Postmodern, 2, 4, 5, 7, 18, 35, 59, 65–92, 137, 146, 150, 151, 153, 178, 182 Postmodern Condition, The, 5, 68 Postmodernism, 5, 65–69, 71, 73, 83 Postmodernity, 130 Power, 4, 6, 7, 35, 48, 49, 78, 79, 84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 98, 111, 114, 124, 125, 135, 137, 142, 143, 151, 154, 171, 177, 180, 181, 188, 198, 200, 201, 203, 204 Pragmatism, 23, 65–67, 82 Presocratics, 107 Protagoras, 34, 67 Pyrrho, 34 R Race, 5, 125, 201 Real, vii, 2, 4, 6, 7, 24, 26, 28, 40, 47, 68, 70, 71, 73, 85, 86, 92, 102, 103, 105–109, 111, 114–120,

211

123, 140, 149, 152, 155, 168–173, 176, 179, 181, 188, 191–193, 198 Reception, 29, 43, 71, 89, 105, 109, 150, 152, 162, 190 Religion, 4, 5, 45, 50, 57, 151, 152, 199 Repetition, 12, 13, 155 Resistentialism, 109, 114–120 Richardson, Robert, 24 Rumsfeld, Donald, 59, 60 S Sartre, Jean Paul, viii, 42–44, 96 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 174 Seigfried Haddock, Charlene, 145 Seriousness, viii, 28, 29, 33, 45–48, 50–56, 177 Shakespeare, William, 112, 117, 157 Shibboleths, 4, 5 Skepticism, 3, 21, 22, 24, 25, 31, 34, 35, 37, 82, 83, 90, 197, 198 Socrates, 5, 6, 12, 20, 24, 26, 34, 48, 66, 67, 72, 157, 158, 161, 172 Sophocles, 27 Sorites, 82, 83, 114, 145–163, 177 Soul, 6, 7, 37, 54, 70, 86, 92, 98, 99, 104, 138, 141, 152, 194, 195, 199 Sphinx, 12, 26–29, 120 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 167–169 Stoicism, 23 Sublime, 29, 38, 39, 41, 54, 135, 150 T Teleology, developmental, 107, 110, 123, 125

212 

INDEX

Thinking, viii, 1–13, 17, 18, 20, 21, 24–26, 31–56, 58, 61, 66, 71, 72, 74, 79, 81, 88, 89, 99, 100, 102–105, 107, 109, 113, 114, 117, 123, 124, 128, 129, 131, 133, 134, 136–143, 146, 154–157, 160–162, 180–195, 197–206 Timaeus/Timaeus, 12, 137–139 Trace, vii, viii, 34, 50, 165–182, 186, 205 Tragic, 38, 39, 42, 54–56 Transcendentalism, 166 Transcendentalists, 118, 166, 200, 201 Transcendental schema, 141 Truth, 5, 13, 28, 34–36, 39–41, 54, 55, 66, 74–77, 79–83, 89, 97, 105, 111, 118, 129, 132, 138, 151, 165, 171, 173, 177, 180, 200 Twain, Mark, 28, 53

U Unorientables, 101, 102 Urbas, Joseph, 1–4 W Whicher, Stephen, 3, 4, 8, 205 Winters, Yvor, 205 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 12, 19, 20, 40, 70, 112, 162 Word Art, 104 World Viewed, The, 2 Z Zeno’s paradoxes, 117 Zimzum, 44, 45, 89 Žižek, Slavoj, vii, 7, 13, 22, 38, 59–61, 66, 67, 86, 90–92, 95–120