The Transformation of Genius into Practical Power: A Reading of Emerson’s “Experience”

Long is the wayAnd hard that out of hell leads up to light.

—John Milton, Paradise Lost¹

And I . . . saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

—Revelations 21:2²

I. Into Hell and Out Again

Experience” begins with a puzzling prefatory poem in which “the lords of life” pass, as if in a dream, before the speaker’s eyes.³ His names for them include “Use and Surprise,” “Succession swift,” “spectral Wrong,” and “Temperament without a tongue.” We then awaken with him on a series of stairs, able to see neither whence we have come nor where we might be headed. Emerson confesses that his imagination has gone dark. He is having trouble acting in the world at all. The third paragraph refers chillingly to the death of his son, little Waldo, two years before, an experience that has thrust Emerson so far within himself that the calamity “does not touch” him. It “falls off” from him (EL. 473). In the “Immortality Ode,” a poem that mattered greatly to Emerson, Wordsworth had written of “outward things, / Fallings from us, vanishings.”⁴ Montaigne, after giving four classical examples of fathers who shed no tears over the deaths of their children, had described himself as barely touched by the deaths of “two or three” of his. The perverse implication is that he could not remember how many.⁵ Emerson’s response is equally cool, but he will never forget his loss. He is preoccupied with his disturbingly unfeeling experience of it.

The person he cared most about is dead, yet he speaks of the loss with frigid detachment: “It was caducous.” Bark falling off a tree is caducous. The outer world seems unreal. Numb, almost comatose, he grieves that he has learned nothing from grief. His grief, though deep and immobilizing, is second-order grief. He asks whether this experience, any experience, can teach him anything. His genius has deserted him. How, one wonders, did the essay before us get written if that is so? How has a man with a silent muse wrought such arresting images? There is no darker passage, no more excessive example, in all of Emerson. The scholars are, understandably, riveted on it. Their habit is to read the entire essay through this one example, turning to other passages mainly for further evidence of despondency.

As a result, little has been written about the essay’s uplifting peroration, which, after one last glimpse of the abyss, pulls back from despair and ecstatically rejoins the public world: “Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!—it seems to say,—there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power” (EL. 492).⁶ Maurice Gonnaud draws attention to this ending.⁷ Cornel West declares its insistence on “the embodiment of the ideal but. in the real” both an overriding theme in Emerson’s work and an appropriate starting point for a genealogy of American pragmatism.⁸ But neither Gonnaud nor West discusses it closely or in relation to the essay as a whole. Joel Porte says a little more about it before dismissing it brusquely as a “weak attempt to recoup losses.”⁹ I hope to show that if we read “Experience” carefully, in light of its ending, its allusions, its rhetorical strategy, and its immediate religious and political context, we can discern the arguments Emerson is actually making and then decide, on that basis, whether they are as weak as Porte supposes them to be and whether they have the significance West takes them to have. My answers to those questions will be no and yes, respectively.

George Kateb, the most distinguished political theorist to write at length on “Experience,” bypasses the ending.¹⁰ He holds that self-reliance, as Emerson understands it, “cannot best show itself in worldly presence or activity.” The “net effect” of “Experience,” Kateb says, “is...