Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth

Paradox Abounding: Tension and the Via Media Nature of the Essay

paradox abounding tension and the via media nature of the essay Man ’s base nature is the outcome of self-assertion. DaisetzT. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture Then I dare; I will also essay to be. RalphWaldo Emerson, Journal Essays, however, hang somewhere on a line between two sturdy poles: this is what I think, and this is what I am. Edward Hoagland, “What IThink,What I Am” - This page intentionally left blank The g reatest inter nal threat to theWest may be the culture of self-esteem, a much-ballyhooed legacy of the Renaissance and the Reformation and an essential component of the unleashed individualism that the French Revolution, Romanticism, and modernism developed in fearful but not unforeseen ways. Postmodernism has challenged “the autonomy of the individual,” as did, from a rather different perception, Modernist (not to be confused with modern) writers nearly a century ago. The common enemy is the same individualism and belief in the sanctity of the private self that Wordsworth declared and celebrated as revolutionary in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and incarnated in his great work The Prelude (subtitled Growth of a Poet’s Mind: An Autobiographical Poem).These ideas stem from the religious enthusiasm and dissent that fueled the Reformation, they took on new life preceding and during the English civil war, and they burned in the memory and imagination of neo-Augustan writers, for whom regicide and the re-establishment of a commonwealth or some form of theocracy remained an everpresent danger. Individualism, though, like kudzu, is swarming, voracious, and hardy.There is no undoing what “the priesthood of all believers” wrought.There are, however, better and worse ways of dealing with what may have begun as an undeniable “Good.” In the present climate and with so much sustenance and support, the cult of self-esteem flourishes as a byproduct of regnant individualism .Television hourly promotes and celebrates it, and modern education appears as little more than the formalization of the mindless 97 patterings often available from Oprah, Doctor Phil, and Richard Simmons. The facilitation of self-esteem long ago threatened teaching , and learning diminished even before Foucault equated discipline and punishment. Who now subscribes to or even appears willing to listen to calls such as Eliot’s for “prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action” (The Dry Salvages, Four Quartets)?1 Who now even entertains—the word is depressingly precise—the possibility that my opinion is not as good as anyone else’s, that being true to oneself may be dangerous rather than salutary, that independence, self-sufficiency, and assertiveness prove often to be forms of indulgence and sophomoric defiance and rebelliousness that should be discouraged and restrained rather than cultivated and promoted? Rousseau has never before enjoyed so much influence, even if unacknowledged. I must, in other words, feel good about myself, noble though savage, to the point of brooking no challenge to my “self-worth.” All the while, the puny, pusillanimous self grows fat and lazy—and all the more willful and determined, enjoying privilege and place never before accorded it in the East or theWest.To put it in terms familiar to Dryden, Swift, and Pope, ours is a “latitudinarian” age, ours an “easie God” that “instructs Thee to rebell”; thus writes a severe critic of “the private spirit” and “fanaticism” in his remarkably prescient layman’s faith: “Thou art Justice in the last Appeal” (Religio Laici 96, 95).2 Recently in my advanced composition class, a graduating English major said that what he had learned over four years was little more than how to respond to questions: “All you have to do is begin, ‘In my opinion. . . .’” Exaggeration and melodramatic effect aside, there is woeful truth here, for judgment and comparative evaluation, based in knowledge, thoughtful consideration, and a rational and defensible sense of standards, have next to no place in 98 paradox abounding the prevailing conception of literary studies, which were once historical and objective and now are theoretical, subjective, and political . I see little evidence of a desire to distinguish between excellence and mediocrity. No wonder that students leave the university supposing their opinion is equal to Pope’s, Eliot’s, Dante’s, or Homer’s. Leveling exacts a heavy toll. It is bad enough that we insist on “leveling the playing-field,” democratizing “opinion,” and in the end embellishing the image we carry of our self. “Don’t make me...