Emerson’s Temporalities: The Eternal Present vs. the Not Yet Present

1. introduction

In “Experience” (1844), Emerson writes, “Our life seems not present, so much as prospective.”¹ Here and elsewhere he expresses an intuition of human and natural vitality as a process of becoming and a progression toward a glimpsable but not yet existent, more harmonious state. “Not for the affairs on which it is wasted,” he continues, “but as a hint of this vast-flowing vigor” (3:42). That is, our life hints toward the eventual manifestation of the “unbounded substance”—one of his many terms for the divine power—mentioned a few lines earlier. Emerson describes a hopeful path, a “tendency or direction,” toward the future realization of something higher that is intimated but not yet actual (3:42). “Life is hereby melted into an expectation or a religion” (3:41).

However, just before and after these passages, and elsewhere in his writings, Emerson also maintains that this ultimate power is always already present in the here and now, and in all our actions: “Every day, every act betrays the ill-concealed deity” (3:45). Underlying and omnipresent, the divine energy not only invests every day and every moment with its immanent force, but it also isolates the present moment from all others, extracting it from linear time, creating a highly charged eternal present: “God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future” (3:39). We are not invited to orient ourselves prospectively towards the future, but rather to experience fully the heightened moment: “‘You will not remember,’ he seems to say, ‘and you will not expect’” (3:39). The charged present instant is self-contained and specifically denies any connection to future or past. Paradoxically, for Emerson, being’s grandeur is both yet to come and forever underlying the flux of multiplicity; it is both future and eternally present.

We thus have the juxtaposition of two quite different temporalities: the linear, progressive, teleological temporality of a movement toward a higher state that is heralded but not yet existent; and the instantaneous, spontaneous temporality of heightened spiritual experience manifesting itself in the present moment, which rejects before and after but welcomes eternity. This coexistence is apparent not only in “Experience” but throughout Emerson’s writings. What are the relationships between these two temporalities? Can we draw a larger circle around this apparent contradiction, or does it exemplify an unresolved or irreducible instability? This essay will explore these questions, arguing that the discrepancy between these divergent views of time manifests a fundamental metaphysical tension that informs Emerson’s thought. I’ll first briefly situate my approach within the framework of recent scholarship that aims to understand Emerson as a religious and metaphysical thinker. Then after outlining the two temporalities, I’ll discuss Stanley Cavell’s antimetaphysical reading of Emersonian time, and finally propose that while we cannot resolve the tension between the two views, we can interpret it by placing it in the context of Emerson’s metaphysics.

2. “detranscendentalizing” and “retranscendentalizing” emerson

The “detranscendentalizing” critical approach to Emerson and other Transcendentalists arose during the poststructuralist period, marked by its generally skeptical and antimetaphysical critical attitude, and has taken the form of analyses that tend to minimize, sideline or negate the religious and metaphysical foundations of Transcendentalist thought. Lawrence Buell first used the term in 1984, and it resurfaced in the title of Michael Lopez’s 1988 article “De-transcendentalizing Emerson.”² An example of this resistence to Emerson’s religious and metaphysical thought appears in George Kateb’s 1995 Emerson and Self-Reliance; struggling to read Emerson as a secular thinker, Kateb writes with frank sincerity, “It is obvious that I find the religiousness of Emerson an impediment to my reception . . . The fact of pervasive religiousness remains a tremendous problem.”³ He eventually concludes that “we can judge the problem of his religiousness as minor.”⁴ Lopez wrote the following year that Emerson’s and other contemporaneous writers’ “dependence on a religious vocabulary . . . can be profoundly misleading”; he found their usage of “terms like spirit, Over-Soul, the absolute, Unity, ‘ever...