We only wish that Emerson could have witnessed the 20th century, its brutality, its murderous regimes, its epochal indifference to life.
Ever hear of the Civil War, guys? Emerson lived through it.
We only wish that Emerson could have witnessed the 20th century, its brutality, its murderous regimes, its epochal indifference to life.
Ever hear of the 19th century? It's when the Civil War occurred.
ReplyDeleteUh, yeah. Now make the connection with what the quote from the article says. Come on, you can do it.
ReplyDeleteLet Emerson answer. He beats these two chaps to the punch in the very essay they hold out for ridicule:
ReplyDelete"Life only avails, not the having lived. 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. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power not confident but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is."
Emerson speaks of "the soul," Whitman of the ever-vital "procreant urge of the world." And both are willing to be "shoved equally aside"––until we find them again somewhere, waiting for us.
As for Emerson's "egotism," bear in mind what he says in "Circles":
"Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts, and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall."
And then this from "Experience":
“Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.”
Here, Emerson reconciles (or tries to) his Transcendentalist belief in the ultimate unreality of “personal” identity with his profoundly democratic instincts. What would become the anti-foundationalist strain in American pragmatism finds its taproot in this singular intuition of Emerson's: While we are in this world, whatever sort of world it is––and while we are amongst ourselves, whatever sort of “selves” we are––we must somehow get along. Beyond that aspiration lies nothing.
And not a word from our two professors from Hartford about Emerson's ready defense of John Brown?
"Nothing is more absurd than to complain of this sympathy [with Brown]," Emerson said at Salem, "or to complain of a party of men united in opposition to slavery. As well complain of gravity, or the ebb of the tide. Who makes the abolitionist? The slave-holder. The sentiment of mercy is the natural recoil which the laws of the universe provide to protect man-kind from destruction by savage passions. And our blind statesmen go up and down, with committees of vigilance and safety, hunting for the origin of this new heresy. They will need a very vigilant committee indeed to find its birthplace, and a very strong force to root it out. For the arch-abolitionist, older than Brown, and older than the Shenandoah Mountains, is Love, whose other name is Justice, which was before Alfred, before Lycurgus, before slavery, and will be after it."
Thank you, Mark. As Dr. Johnson would say, "There's an end on it."
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