Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

Besides a new Journal volume in the Princeton Edition of Henry David Thoreau's Writings, this year was marked by several fine historically oriented studies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and of Transcendentalism and by continued interest in Emerson, Thoreau, and antislavery. Especially noteworthy were Neal Dolan's comprehensive study of Emerson and liberal thought; Ian Finseth's important cultural and literary history of antebellum environmental philosophy and race; Alex M. Zakaras's historically situated analysis of Emerson's political philosophy; and Adam Tuchinsky's study of Horace Greeley and the New-York Tribune, a rich intellectual history of socialist liberalism.

i. Ralph Waldo Emerson

a. Emerson and Politics

Everyone who ponders Emerson's reform activities, his conception of citizenship, or any other social issues in his work sooner or later comes up against the Emerson dilemma (to borrow the title of T. Gregory Garvey's valuable collection [see AmLS 2001, p. 4]): the tension Emerson wrote and lived between inspiration and action, receptivity and social obligation, transcendentalism and reform activism. While to some degree all the work discussed in this chapter that treats Emerson and politics wrestles with this tension, it has never been more productively explored than by Alex M. Zakaras's Individuality and Mass Democracy: Mill, Emerson, and the Burdens of Citizenship (Oxford), which makes a compelling case for individuality as a model of citizenship capable of functioning in large, impersonal polities as well as in ethically and culturally diverse ones. Part of Zakaras's project involves redressing the common representation of Emerson and John Stuart Mill as naive optimists. Democracy, he reminds us, was still an experiment in their time; the word itself was often a term of abuse. Although hopeful that the experiment would come good, both understood its fragility. True, they had little conception of the power of the modern corporation or of economic elites to manipulate mass citizenry. But they also had a keener awareness of its distinctive characteristics, in contrast to monarchical and aristocratic orders, than we. So, like Alexis de Tocqueville, they worried about such things as the socially corrosive effects of human selfishness, creeping mediocrity, and the abdication of independent thought.

In this light, Zacharas reframes the Emerson dilemma by disconnecting Emerson's conception of individuality from autonomous individualism. "Emerson did not celebrate a withdrawal from society or history, nor did he hold a radically asocial or ahistorical conception of the individual." Indeed, Emerson feared "solipsistic isolation and alienation" as much as he did conformity. The tendency to self-alienate, to conform, or to judge according to one's own narrow interests produces what Zakaras terms the complicit or "docile individual." It is the primary work of self-culture to disrupt and reform this docility, awaking the active soul, first, to natural and aesthetic experience, and then, through the demands of friendship and the provocations of conversation, to wider forms of virtue, including responsible citizenship.

Here Zakaras follows Stanley Cavell, whose conception of Emersonian perfectionism he glosses to imply that "democracy, properly understood, invites us to be better than we are, because it depends so heavily on the virtue of its citizens," an invitation that also requires them to strive to avoid complicity with the injustices of the state. Because Emerson understood that complicity is both "ubiquitous and inadvertent," avoiding or limiting complicity requires "a politically active ethics": reflective moral judgment followed by active dissent. Zakaras argues that Emerson's antislavery actions followed directly from such an ethics of noncomplicity. In "confronting slavery, Emerson saw deeply into the everyday democratic condition" in which citizens must continually "face the dilemma between potentially culpable quiescence and potentially dangerous collective action." In this view, the dilemma is not Emerson's alone but rather democratic individuality defined by the blessings and the burdens of responsible citizenship.

Also indebted to Cavell, Nathan Crick coins the term "rhetorical singularity" to designate the prime genre of the discourse of moral perfectionism ("The Rhetorical Singularity," RhetRev 28: 370-87). In order to "bring forth excellence in character" rhetorical singularities "persuade by projecting complex and challenging ideals of who we might be through adopting the courage, knowledge...