A Political Companion to Walt Whitman

Chapter 1: Walt Whitman and the Culture of Democracy

Walt Whitman and the Culture of Democracy 19 I THINK THAT WALT WHITMAN is a great philosopher of democracy. Indeed, he may be the greatest. As Thoreau said, Whitman “is apparently the greatest democrat the world has ever seen.”1 To put it more academically , he is perhaps the greatest philosopher of the culture of democracy. He writes the best phrases and sentences about democracy. By democratic culture, I mean these things especially. First, democratic culture is (or can be) the soil for the creation of new works of high art—great poems and moral writings, in particular. Second, democratic culture is (or is becoming) a particularist stylization of life—that is, a distinctive set of appearances, habits, rituals, dress, ceremonies, folk traditions, and historical memories. Third, democratic culture is (or can be) the soil for the emergence of great souls whose greatness consists in themselves being like works of art in the spirit of a new aristocracy. All these meanings are interconnected and appear in Whitman’s writings throughout his life. Perhaps they receive their most powerful expression in “Democratic Vistas.” But, in my judgment, the central meaning when we study Whitman is democratic culture as the setting in which what I have elsewhere called “democratic individuality” (a phrase close to Whitman’s usage) is slowly being disclosed. I believe that the setting for democratic individuality is a greatly more powerful and original idea than any of the other ideas of democratic culture that I have just mentioned. In other places, I have tried to suggest that working together with Emerson and Thoreau, Whitman tries to draw out the fuller moral and existential significance of rights. These are the rights that individuals have as persons, and that the political system of democracy exists in order to CHAPTER 1 George Kateb 20 George Kateb protect, and also to embody in its workings. Democratic individuality is what rights-based individualism in a democracy could eventually become, once the political separation from the Old World was complete; and had already become, to some degree, in their time. I see the Emersonians as trying to encourage the tendency to democratic individuality, to urge it forward so that it may express itself ever more confidently and therefore more splendidly. In their conception of democratic individuality, I find three components: self-expression, resistance in behalf of others, and receptivity or responsiveness (being “hospitable”) to others. My judgment is that for the Emersonians, the most important component of democratic individuality, by far, is receptivity or responsiveness. An individual’s insistence on first being oneself expressively is valuable mostly as a preparation for receptivity or responsiveness: behavioral nonconformity loosens the hold of narrow or conventional methods of seeing and feeling (as well as preparing a person to take a principled stand in favor of those denied their rights). This responsiveness or receptivity can also be described as a way—a profoundly democratic way—of being connected to others and to nature. As Whitman says in “Song of the Open Road”: “Here the profound lesson of reception, nor preference nor denial.”2 It is a way that deepens the sort of connectedness already present in rights-based individualism, but that only time and a steady commitment to rights can call forth. Time is needed because rights-based individualism is such a strange idea, and so untypical of past human experience, that those who live it and live by it—even though imperfectly—have to keep remembering, or keep learning as if they never knew, both the basic meaning and the further implications of what they profess and enact. And the steady commitment therefore turns out to be not so steady after all, but only as steady as the strangeness permits. I would like to explore the connectedness that emanates from democratic individuality, as Whitman perceives and perfects it. He knows, let it be said immediately, the extent of the strangeness, and the steadiness for what it is, in democratic society. He says in the Preface, 1876, to Leaves of Grass: “For though perhaps the main points of all ages and nations are points of resemblance, and, even while granting evolution, are substantially the same, there are some vital things in which this Republic, as to its individualities , and as a compacted Nation, is to specially stand forth, and culminate modern humanity. And these are the very things it least morally Whitman and the Culture...