Liberal Justice and Particular Identity: Cavell, Emerson, Rawls

For the liberal tradition, justice and identity appear both difficult to relate and inextricably intertwined. After years of contestatory identity politics, liberalism still proffers Americans a paradoxical national ideology that construes these terms as mutually exclusive. Identity, prejudice, and discrimination stand opposed to universality, equity, and freedom. Liberalism's central tenet, reaffirmed from Locke through Kant, to Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Rawls, holds that justice dissolves all particularities before a universally shared and immanent lawfulness. Even Emerson's most ethereal affirmations rhyme with liberalism's core beliefs. "Within man," as he wrote in "The Over-Soul," is "the soul of the whole" (386). Emerson's affirmation that each particular individual participates in the "transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest law" may express a religious sentiment, but a similar belief in lawful and impersonal universality also grounds liberal ideals of secular justice. Emerson's identification with such beliefs makes him, as Stanley Cavell and others have affirmed, a founding figure of American thought. Moreover, these beliefs have a practical aspect. Emerson himself, only a few years after "The Over-Soul" appeared in print, took the stage to speak out against the injustices of slavery. His long participation in the abolitionist movement stands as an immanent expression of his transcendentalist ideals applied to particular problems of justice.¹

Of course, the history of the modern world generally and the history of the United States particularly make clear that difficulties attend the practical achievement of liberal universalism however possible it may seem in theory. History suggests that doing justice entails not simply ignoring the other's identity but learning to recognize what that identity demands. If prejudice and discrimination did not exist, then injustice and identity might not be so closely linked. If injustice and identity were not so closely linked, then doing justice might not require attending to the experiences of the world identity helps shape and the problems in the world identity poses. Identity, therefore, represents both the potential fulfillment and the actual failure of liberalism's dream of universality, the dangerous and necessary content of the American dream itself.

Here stands a dilemma, not exceptionally American but particularly so. At one extreme, liberal apologists dream of making identities disappear by repositioning phenomenal selves in a realm of transcendent abstractions distant from the limitations of lived relations to the world. They try to remain blind to the identity questions and subject positions that actual disputes about justice so often involve. At the other extreme, champions of republican virtue, communitarians and radical democrats, in opposition to liberal philosophers from Kant to Rawls, realize the inadequacy of liberalism's abstraction from the material conditions of worldly experience and limited perspectives; they aim to reclaim the situated embodiment of identities and their particular experiences and truths. But they lose sight of that aspiration toward universal validity and transcendent principle without which neither judgment nor ethics seems thinkable.² Some version of this dispute between liberal and communitarian values has continued since the nation's beginnings.³ If, as Cavell claims, Emerson founds an American tradition of thought, then he does so because, despite all his transcendental yearnings, he remains the great poet of America's particular contradictions. For him men and women are neither the representatives of a universal lawfulness toward which all may aspire nor the embodiment of local pressures that limit and shape specific lives. They are, impossibly, both. In the same paragraph of "The Over-Soul" cited above, in one of his characteristic transcendentalist upsurges, Emerson writes, "We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles" (386). For Emerson, as he says in "History," "A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world" (254). An American may be a god in nature or a weed by the wall, but he must find or forge an original relation with his fellows. Emerson's fundamental lesson proves difficult to master.

Many of Emerson's most dedicated readers will resist an ethically engaged reading of his transcendental upsurges, which they still see as distinct from...