A Political Companion to Walt Whitman

Chapter 13: Democratic Enlightenment: Whitman and Aesthetic Education

Democratic Enlightenment: Whitman and Aesthetic Education 310 One part does not counteract another part, he is the joiner, he sees how they join. —Walt Whitman, “Song of the Answerer,” from Leaves of Grass Democratic Vistas: The Map to Whitman’s Poetry ROUGHLY TWELVE TOPICS CAN be distinguished in Whitman’s essay Democratic Vistas, all of which he brings to bear on the three questions he struggles with most.1 What constitutes the uniqueness of democracy in America? What is required for American democracy to develop its unique potential and break with all past societies, their cultures, and the principles on which they are based? How would global history be altered if America’s unique democratic potential were to reach fruition? To appreciate how Whitman ’s discussion of these twelve topics answers these questions, special attention should be paid to a structural feature belonging to Democratic Vistas. As each is introduced, none of the topics is discussed fully before he moves on to the next. Each is examined only in part before yielding to another introduced for the first time or being taken up again. By the time his essay concludes, all topics have been returned to often, while certain have been treated more often and more completely. Reading Whitman with the structural logic of Democratic Vistas in mind highlights the topics around which it revolves, underscores any among them that play a more pivotal role in his argument, and focuses our analysis of his essay on its three central questions. CHAPTER 13 Morton Schoolman Democratic Enlightenment 311 Individual—Mass—Equality Whitman writes more than four thousand of his nearly twenty-six-thousandword essay before signaling his intention to “proceed with my speculations, Vistas” (964). In this prologue, as I want to describe it, to Democratic Vistas , the structure of his argument unfolds as he foregrounds all but two of the topics he will engage in the essay. Whitman begins with brief observations on America’s democratic ambitions with which he celebrates its “democratic republican principle” and “theory of development and perfection by voluntary standards, and selfreliance ” (953). By the democratic republican principle, Whitman understands “political liberty [and] equality” (966), or equal rights recognizing individuals universally to be the same, whereas “development and perfection by voluntary standards, and self-reliance” refer to the individual’s right to self-determination, the right to be and to become different. Equal rights as sameness and individual rights as difference are suggested by the plurality of meanings Whitman associates with equality and personal development in his essay as a whole. On the side of equality, he speaks of the “People” (or the “people”), the “mass, or lump character,” the “leveler, the unyielding principle of the average,” while on the side of personal development he refers to “lessons of variety and freedom,” a “large variety of character,” “individualism” or “individuality,” “personalism” or “varied personalism.” Wherever Whitman discusses these and analogous terms, he is returning to his first and second topics, the individual and the mass, which he maintains stand in contradiction and must be reconciled. Whitman has in mind this problem of contradiction and reconciliation when in short order he joins his opening observations to the promise not to “gloss over the appalling dangers of universal suffrage,” specifically the “people’s crudeness, vice, caprices,” about which, he reports, “I mainly write this essay” (954). Untutored popular suffrage threatens a range of democratic convictions, individuality in his estimation the most important. To balance the undemocratic sensibility expressed by such a blunt circumspection about the mass, Whitman turns to attack remnants of feudalism he insists America has to “surmount . . . or else prove the most tremendous failure of time” (954). Feudalism, the caste-based enemy of equality, is “grown not for America” (998). Whitman’s concern with lingering feudal institutions extends to the influence of ecclesiastic practices on 312 Morton Schoolman democracy’s private sphere, where mores insinuated by religious teachings contribute to the perpetuation of inequality, religious inequality surely, though he may well have had gender inequality in mind as well. He objects to the church’s sustained impact on “education . . . social standards and literature” despite “feudalism . . . palpably retreating from political institutions ” in America (955). Whitman’s anxiety about feudal influences on moral education and manners not only illustrates his allegiance to equality. It reveals that for him the achievement of equality anticipates the question of what form the civic education of the...