Transcendental Twain: A New Reading of "What is Man?"

Many of the relatively few pages of scholarship on Mark Twain's "What is Man?" note that its conversation between Old Man and Young Man resembles a Platonic dialogue. But this observation has not been closely explained.¹ In what follows, I demonstrate that Twain's dialogue has little in common with Plato's because Twain does not merely imitate but indeed satirizes Platonic form. As a result we discover that his self-proclaimed "gospel" does not believe its own claims, for "What is Man?" expounds determinism precisely as it demonstrates that only a "petrified" thinker could hold determinist views. This is not to say that Twain entirely undercuts the Old Man's doctrine and offers instead a portrait of human autonomy;² rather, his satire of dialogical encounter does demonstrate that we are maneuvered inordinately, if not exclusively, by external influences.³ However, I want to argue that "What is Man?" accomplishes something grander than polemics, that it does more than vie for one or another doctrine of human conduct, in part because it finds that anyone secure in any truth must be a fool. In short, the essay insists not on truth claims per se, but instead on the power of intuition; and at the same time it bears witness to culture's power to undo intuition. I am not interested in arguing that because intuitions are culturally determined ("She thinks x is true because she belongs to culture y"), we must historicize them to locate their explanatory value. Rather, I am arguing that Twain believed in the faculty of intuition as such, as a distinctly human capacity without which he believed we cannot think; yet he accepted as well—and forlornly—that we almost always choose to disregard intuition because we choose instead to let others—other persons, norms, institutions—think for us. If we would trust ourselves, he thought, intuition could be allowed to guide us to thinking, that is, to examining ourselves within and our claims upon the world. If we trust others, the faculty will only seem "petrifying" and we never will get to thinking. Intuition paradoxically can enable us to become our own influence, for it guides us to imagine our own thinking as a metaphysical source, as if it arrived from an authoritative elsewhere. Twain is more Emersonian than we thought.

Intuition and examination for Twain constitute moral action. Therefore, morality is based in originative thinking and perpetual consciousness and not in abiding imitation of good form or application of moral principles, methods that conceive of the moral in normative, prescriptive, and hence unresponsive terms. We might say that Twain is a moralist who lacks a moral theory, but it is even more correct to say that he is a moralist because he lacks a moral theory. But he does indeed have a moral pedagogy that seeks to deliver moral instruction indirectly via demonstration: specifically, by parodying explicitly proclaimed moral instruction and instructors. The only way Twain could moralize effectively was by concealing his moralizing.⁴ With the exception of Joan of Arc, Twain never directly preaches his morality of thinking, an act that could lead him only to even more wrenching self-disgust.

Connecting Twain with morality and intuition might seem counterintuitive or even downright wrong. After all, he long has been confirmed a herald of American culture, not an oracle of truth. But if I can make my case, I will demonstrate that Twain is persuasive as a moralist precisely because we hesitate to call him one and that his power as cultural critic in fact derives from his moral force.

The precision of the Platonic mimicry in "What is Man?" suggests that Twain carefully studied the dialogues. Indeed, by 1874, thirty-two years before the publication of his gospel, he had owned and read Plato aloud to Livy.⁵ When we think of Twain gathering material for his writing, usually we do not imagine him mining the classics at home with his wife; normally, he is out cavorting with scoundrels. That favored image of Twain as an untaught rogue has predominated.⁶ But Twain was...