American Metempsychosis: Emerson, Whitman, and the New Poetry

1 /The Metempsychotic Mind

1 / The Metempsychotic Mind In the last three decades, the widespread understanding of Ralph Waldo Emerson as a philosopher of metaphysical unity has given way to a more postmodern appraisal. Scholars have come to view Emerson’s thought as a contemplative progression where no determination can be final, since the process itself is perpetually ongoing and open-ended.1 These recent efforts at de-transcendentalizing and revitalizing Emerson counter the longestablished tendencies of criticism to portray him as a cheerful mystic who is but an echo—however powerful and influential—of traditional metaphysics .2 Instead, scholars characterize Emerson as a post-Idealist, a pragmatist , an evolutionist, or a political radical. While these depictions may seem appropriate, Emerson’s lifelong attempts to safeguard the idea of the soul in an age of scientific advancement by conceptualizing it as “a volatile essence,” ever playful and mysterious, neither a foundation nor a touchstone for being, but an unsettling indeterminacy within the structure of human cognition—this deserves renewed attention. Emerson’s recurrent use of the ancient notion of metempsychosis—the transmigration of the soul through successive bodies—is one principal instance of his literary and philosophical inventiveness at work, namely, his search for a figurative blueprint to marry the vast, material sequence of history with the elusive, unsettled activity of the soul. While older scholarship ignored or tended to dismiss such depictions of metempsychosis,3 Arthur Versluis makes the case that Emerson “took transmigration seriously” and tended to view it “as a literary conceit first and as a doctrine second,” although he was “always seeking to express it in Western terms.”4 Versluis is indeed correct to emphasize the freedom 12 / the metempsychotic mind with which Emerson “manipulates” the idea of Indian transmigration and combines it with a Neoplatonic reading, but it is my contention that Emerson adapted the idea of metempsychosis in a much more thorough manner than anyone has previously shown. Like so many of his contemporaries , Emerson used Vedantic and Confucian sources through the filter of Idealistic thought on the esoteric assumption that all great religions and philosophies contain the same universal truths. At the same time, Emerson ’s use of metempsychosis is more complex and nuanced than this might suppose, for it can be most appropriately understood not simply as an esoteric , exotic, or mystical doctrine, common to both Eastern and Western traditions, but as a figurative template for placing the modern individual within the vast record of history—“in the entire series of days” (W 2: 3). Incorporating the language of metaphysics into the revolutions of science, particularly the new vastness of the geological record and theories of adaptation and evolution emerging in biology, Emerson repeatedly stresses how the structure of transmigration—the soul running through the historical series—can indicate the initial outlines of a greater theory of human cognition and perception. I begin with Emerson’s most detailed description of “the metempsychosis of nature” (W 2: 8) from the leading piece, “History,” of his First Series of Essays (1841). Here, Emerson presents metempsychosis not as literal religious doctrine, but as a mode of perception that culminates in an active search for cognitive unity. In the following sections, I outline the principal influences upon Emerson’s metaphysics: ancient Greek metempsychosis , especially the Platonic tradition, which I discuss throughout, Hindu reincarnation, Goethean metamorphosis, Hegelian phenomenology , and Christian esotericism. With this diverse array of influences, I show how Emerson transforms metempsychosis into a developmental and evolutionary prototype, a truly volatile poetic power that unsettles the static delineations of history so that an individual can command his or her own self-development. In such a setting, Emerson’s metempsychotic mind underscores the prospect of a new humanism, a spiritual science that reconceives of the human being’s cognitive and artistic capacity by adapting metaphysics to modern consciousness. Soul and the Historical Series Emerson’s notion of self-reliance has become a thoroughly American value, although it can be properly understood as an expression of the Protestant faith he both inherited and abandoned. Already in his early lectures , Emerson anticipates the spirit of Representative Men (1850) in his biographies (1835) of Martin Luther (1483–1546) and George Fox (1624–91) the metempsychotic mind / 13 who embody, for him, the ideas of immanence, reform, and self-reliance expressing themselves in history. Of Luther, he writes, “No man in history ever assumed a more commanding attitude or expressed a more perfect...