Straight to the point

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light
which flashes across his mind from within, more than the
lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses
without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work
of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts:
they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

— Emerson, “Self-Reliance”, 1841

America — the real, the messy, the absurd America — didn’t really begin in 1776. The real America is not a set of documents, or a people, or a big landmass. Even in decline, America is a maze of dizzying and lethal ideals. An untameable instinct to escape: to escape society, history, other people, ourselves. It’s a never-ending yearning for newness and a primal horror at repetition, which stretched across and conquered a continent, before it doubled back on itself and spilled out like a flood over the world. America is extraordinary; America is terrible. Like everywhere else, it drives its citizens nuts. But the whole world knows Americans are crazy in a uniquely grand, stupid way.

The degree to which I can even write those words has much more to do with the mind of Ralph Waldo Emerson than with any Founding Father. In rhetoric, in spirit, the one writer who fixed all the most difficult American paradoxes, like guiding stars for centuries after, was Emerson.

Growing up in Middle America, going to public schools, I never had to read Emerson. My first encounter with him was a sparsely-attended state university survey, which I took to satisfy a requirement. In one semester we blitzed through the first “half” of American literature (from John Winthrop’s Puritan speeches to Uncle Tom’s Cabin) landing briefly on Emerson’s one or two most famous essays. I take this as more or less the normative experience: since then, I’ve met only a handful of Americans who’ve read much of Emerson’s work. My more personal encounters with his writings came later, and they came to me when I was alone. I think it tends to be like this. Emerson still doesn’t quite work in the classroom. Like Michel de Montaigne, like Dr Johnson, or Friedrich Nietzsche (who profoundly admired him), he remains resistant to all but the most single-minded, solitary reader, privately seeking out the man called “the Mind of America”.

But there are always intimations of the Emersonian. There are for each American, whether they know it or not. My father, a liberal Presbyterian minister, had something of the Emersonian in him before he retired. In his tempered and essentially universalist preaching, wherein the Bible was an imperfect human document and there was resolutely no Hell: the mind, the heart, Nature itself — everything was radiant and testified to God. And this God was, in the theologian Paul Tillich’s sense, the “ground of being”, a foundation of love and faith.

A calm, scholarly kind of Protestantism, in other words — hardly the charismatic or enthusiastic Evangelism I saw in other churches. Places where you’d find a very American Christ: a demigod Jesus, with whom the faithful spoke daily, whose powers were the sole arbiter of safety or success in a world largely governed by demons. But I recognise, now, that even these separable styles were intertwined at base, with the same sense of very personal religious revelation: what the critic Harold Bloom once called the American Religion. He meant a religious and political style in which morality came down to individual souls in direct communication with God, not community or society. European Protestantism had become something stranger on the American continent, something intimately wrapped up in the colonisation of the land, the search for a wilderness Eden, the sacrosanctity of individual rights inscribed in the laws. And who was it Bloom identified the American Religion with most? Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville…but, above all, Emerson.

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For those new to Emerson’s writings, the easiest starting points are his first published essay, “Nature” (1836), and the great addresses at Cambridge (“The American Scholar”, 1837) and the Harvard Divinity School (1838). Emerson as a lecturer was a product of the liberal literature of Boston and Concord, and of his own father’s Unitarianism — his Transcendentalism coming out of a collision of Kant, Berkleyan idealism, Coleridge, some pilfered Hinduism. He made his name as a public speaker and co-founder of The Dial (he would later help found The Atlantic in 1857), advocating a radical break from Europe, from past philosophies, even from traditional Christianity. But it was the first Essays, published in 1841, refined from his lectures, which laid out his own paradoxical philosophy.

If you can call it a philosophy, that is. Emerson was a philosopher without a system, and after reading him long enough, I think clearly by design. He is as formless, as disturbingly innocent, as America is — he is as fervently contradictory. When Walt Whitman came to his own apothegm — “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)” — he was, after all, reappropriating the Emerson of “Self-Reliance”: “Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then?…A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Whitman’s poetry became the great vehicle of the Emersonian spirit into the broader world. But what was that spirit?

It helps to start with a sense of the freshness of his moment, as Emerson found it. In his classic American Renaissance, F.O. Matthiessen grounded Emerson’s appearance in two historical zeitgeists. First, the genuine “novel idea given birth”, the esprit which Alexis de Tocqueville had observed in postrevolutionary America. Second, the post-Kantian expansion of rhetorical concepts in the early Romantic era. For Matthiessen, this last was typified by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who as a coiner of critical terms has no real rival in modern English. Matthiessen writes with awe of the many new Coleridgean terms: “…all of which are so familiar to us that it is hard to conceive how anyone ever discussed literature without them…aesthetic, intuitive, idealize, intellectualize, organic, organization, and self-conscious.” Coleridge had even been the first to use the term psychological, in describing Shakespeare’s characters. And this aspect of Shakespeare was deeply important to Emerson, who often read the Bard as a manifestation of the world-soul itself, in literature.

Emerson, the American Coleridge, may very well have been suffering some anxiety of influence when he struck out so plainly at Old World art. Still, Emerson does not coin terms: he rushes to capitalise, to abstract things into expressive monoliths — like Nature, Truth, Time, Love. The first Essays are all so many enormous nouns: “History”, “Self-Reliance”, “Compensation”, “Spiritual Laws”, “Love”, “Friendship”, “Prudence”, “Heroism”, “The Over-Soul”, “Circles”, “Intellect”, “Art”. There are, in between, almost shades of the Keatsian “negative capability”, a slippery anonymity with which that poet described Shakespeare’s genius. The negative capability reflects in Emerson, who is much the opposite: he is all positive: he finds everything in himself.

This is best represented in the most famous of the Essays: “History” and “Self-Reliance”. Of these it’s almost easiest to just hurl quotes. From the first: “All history becomes subjective: in other words, there is properly no history; only biography”; “Every mind must know the whole history for itself.” From the second: “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members”; “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist”. In “Nature”, Emerson had concocted the image of himself as an all-seeing, transparent eyeball — here that eyeball is trained on the world, and in the world he finds an immense, constant affirmation of his subjectivity: a total sympathy of all things, leading back to a primal unity, the God within, what he called the Over-Soul.

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Have I failed to give a picture of the man’s ideas? That may be inevitable. How many people have read “Self-Reliance” and taken from it very different pictures of what an American should be? “Self-Reliance” is — I’m not exaggerating — the real founding American document. Just as all history for Emerson was a litany of texts leading us back to ourselves, to our judgments — so each person is, in his or herself, the sole subjective judge and creator of the cosmos. Each is to listen to their own self, and to their own self alone. There is no salvation in society. Only in solitude are we finally equal to others. “Self-Reliance” on its own gives us the whole tradition of American arts; uncreatively read, it gives us Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford, who posted quotes from Emerson in his factories (right next to copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion). Get at that wild doubling, and you’ll start to get at the magnetically messed-up heart of Emerson’s America.

But read a little deeper: the picture grows bigger. In “Compensation”, Emerson insists that existence rests on the drawing up of cosmic, karmic tables, a reminder that America is founded on a deep sense of injustice (the one thing all Americans may have most in common is the sense that they have been wronged). In “The Over-Soul”, he complicates his own picture, asserting that to be authentically self-reliant is actually to renounce your will, to give yourself up to the universal mind. That when we’re most ourselves, we’re actually in paradoxical sympathy with our most impersonal aspects. Or take the neglected “Friendship”, the rare piece in which the positive Emerson becomes disturbed, ambivalent. He knew very well that a nation of pure individuals would be, essentially, a nation of millions of competing personal religions: as much as the Emersonian listens inwardly for truth, he or she still goes out afterwards, to mingle with a world of strangers doing the same.

Taken together, you can find in the first Essays all the same animating forces which are still churning on in American life today. Every great American is an Emersonian; every terrible American is a perverted, halfway, one. For each extraordinary American quality he helped originate, there are, as Matthiessen wrote, sentiments which, “…working on temperaments less unworldly than their author’s, have provided a vicious reinforcement to the most ruthless elements in our economic life.” He put such a fine point on our individualism, our aspirations and the anti-social character of our freedoms — like Sigmund Freud’s expression of the unconscious, or Nietzsche’s nihilism, his writing is at once the diagnosis and the disease. Who knows anymore who we were before them?

Our rural libertarians are half-Emersonians, and so are our terrified conservatives, guarding their house doors like castles and seething at wokescolds, NGOs and kids who call themselves communists (all of them perverted Emersonians, too). Our environmentalists pervert him when their rhetoric swerves from connection or beauty and grows addicted to self-flagellation, to metaphors of human cancers. Consider that Donald Trump himself is a perverted Emersonian: a man who listens only to himself but still has no self-reliance. How desperately he needs public adulation. That icon-like photo of the assassination attempt testifies to an Emersonian, American fact. The man who totally exemplifies his moment, no matter how shallow or disgusting, will get everything he wants, and he will misunderstand it at every turn.

Because for Emerson, the world may be social, yet a person should never prefer a social truth to the spiritual facts he or she holds at heart. As a political doctrine this seems plainly impossible. At its worst, it leads to something like America today: millions of asocial individuals in constant conflict over millions of grievances. Emerson’s ambivalence still haunts us. We feel, deep down, that individual freedom is simply incompatible with society and social responsibility. Emerson’s belief that a great society might be made up entirely of free-thinking individuals reads now as disturbingly naive.

But reading Emerson always brings me to a freeing realisation: that America may not really matter. Sure, America may slowly die of its paradoxes. It just doesn’t matter — only people matter. The simple truth is that most Americans work hard and care about those around them. I’ve seen it first-hand, in families, even in churches. I’ve seen it nurtured by teachers in some of the most segregated schools in America. They are on their way to being genuine Emersonians: they don’t work from a need for approval or salvation, or for the sake of some bigger political picture. The good they do is out of a personal sense — a common sense — that it is right.

Late in “Circles”, in what may be the subtle best of the Essays, Emerson writes: “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.” That, to me, is so clearly the voice of America, that when I see it, I am myself unsettled. It is beautiful; it is terrifying. This vision of America is equally free, and unmoored. A place without history may be either a hell or a haven: America has always been both. It can always be more of either. We live in a time of isolation and of exhaustive obsession over identity, always selling us on new ways to perform ourselves. But there’s a difference between isolation and solitude, and a difference between selfishness and self-reliance. Even if he cannot help us save modern society, Emerson can at least still teach us how to listen to ourselves in genuine solitude. And that might just be enough.

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