The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism

Notes

NOTES Chapter 1. The Emersonian Prehistory of American Pragmatism 1. The two major recent attempts to reflect upon this "swerve" are Stanley Cavell's "Thinking of Emerson" and "An Emerson Mood" in The Senses of Walden, 2d ed. (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), pp. 123-38, 141-60; and Harold Bloom's Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 16-51, 145-78. 2. Emerson himself notes in his Journals, "My reasoning faculty is proportionately weak" and speaks of a "logical mode of thinking & speaking-which I do not possess, & may not reasonably hope to obtain." Instead, Emerson speaks of his "moral imagination" and of"a passionate love for the strains of eloquence." Emerson in His Journals, selected and edited by Joel Porte (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 45, 46. For evidence of this lack of rigor, see David Van Leer, Emerson's Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 3. "That idea which I approach & am magnetized by-is my country." Emerson in His Journals, p. 321. 4. If there is an overriding theme in Emerson's thought, it is encapsulated in the famous concluding words of his essay "Experience": "The true romance which the world exists to realize will be the transformation of genius into practical power." Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman (New York: New American Library, 1965), pp. 347-48. 5. "Every man is not so much a workman in the world, as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age ... Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder: the steps are actions; the new prospect is power ... The only sin is limitation." "Circles," Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, pp. 298, 299. "Society is fluid." "Politics," ibid., p. 349. "The plasticity of the tough old planet is wonderful." "Journals and Letters," ibid., p. 179. 6. The pertinent texts are John Jay Chapman, "Emerson," Selected Writings of John Jay Chapman, ed. Jacques Barzun (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, Minerva Press, 1968); Quentin Anderson, "The Failure of the Fathers," The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), pp. 3-58; O. W. Firkins, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915); Stephen E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson 243 244 Notes to Pages 11-16 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953); Joel Porte, Representative Man: Emerson in His Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Sherman Paul, Emerson's Angle of Vision (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952); F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941); B. L. Packer, Emerson's Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays (New York: Continuum, 1982). 7. Henry James makes this point when he notes the "thinness of the New England atmosphere" and the "terrible paucity of alternatives," and when he claims that Emerson's America was "not fertile in variations." "The Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson" and "Emerson," Henry James: The American Essays, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Vintage, 1956), pp. 31-51, 51-76. The quotes are found on pp. 45, 56. 8. These four influential views of Emerson are put forward by George Santayana , Quentin Anderson, Harold Bloom, and Sacvan Bercovitch, respectively. See George Santayana, "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy," Winds of Doctrine (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1913), pp. 186-215; Anderson, Imperial Self, pp. 3-58; Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 235-66; Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), pp. 182-205. 9. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar, Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, pp. 238, 239-40. 10. For a powerful interpretation ofthis idea, see Sacvan Bercovitch, "Emerson the Prophet: Romanticism, Puritanism, and Auto-American-Biography," in Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1985), pp. 29-40. 11. Emerson, American Scholar, p. 240. 12. Ibid., pp. 236, 240. 13. Quoted in Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 381. 14. Ibid., p. 495. 15. Ibid., p. 545. 16. Ibid., p. 554. 17. Ibid., p. 555. See also Emerson in His Journals, p. 426. Regarding the immorality of slavery, Emerson had written as early as February 2, 1835: "Let Christianity speak ever for the poor and the...