Reconstructing Individualism: A Pragmatic Tradition from Emerson to Ellison

1 What’s the Use of Reading Emerson Pragmatically?: The Example of William James

{  } one what’s the use of reading emerson pragmatically? The Example of William James B In the opening lines of Pragmatism, William James approvingly quotes G. K. Chesterton’s claim that “the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe”—in other words, his philosophy. In the broadest and most meaningful terms, James asserts that philosophy is “not a technical matter” but rather describes each person’s “sense,” consciously articulated or not, “of what life honestly and deeply means.”1 A philosophy, pragmatists such as James and Dewey argue, is in essence a belief, an attempt to describe reality and orient ourselves toward it in a manner that satisfies fundamental human needs and desires—such as the need actively to express our selves and engage our world, and the moral desire that our actions and choices should make some significant difference.2 The way that we describe the world we inhabit has an immense practical importance, for it shapes the choices we make about how to engage that world, how to act, how to spend the energy of our lives. In other words, ethics—the “practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live?” as Emerson puts it3 —is inseparable from metaphysics. Indeed, one of pragmatism’s central gestures is to insist that philosophical concerns like metaphysics E m E r s on  and epistemology must be understood in terms of ethics, in terms of the difference they make for our conduct: that philosophy must turn away from the traditional concept of truth as accurately or objectively naming the nature of reality, and toward the practice of judging beliefs based on whether they direct our conduct in ways that yield beneficial outcomes. Thus, although this book is concerned with ethics, with alternative visions of individualism, it is also of necessity concerned with broader philosophical concerns. In order to understand the individualist ethics of the writers explored in this study, one must understand their pragmatic views of truth, action, value, and the nature of experience. This is especially true in the case of Emerson. Any assessment of Emerson ’s ethics or politics must begin with a discussion of his metaphysics— his “view of the universe”—for there persists in Emerson studies today a profound disagreement over the basic character of his thought. Applying what James identified as the “most central” and “pregnant” of all philosophical distinctions,4 this disagreement is most clearly framed as the question of whether Emerson is a monist, viewing reality as suffused by an absolute, ideal unity, or a pluralist, viewing reality as characterized by real diversity, particularity, and contingency. For many of Emerson’s critics, from his day to our own, there has been no real debate. As Michael Lopez and Charles Mitchell have shown, the history of Emerson’s critical reception records a remarkably widespread view that Emerson is an idealist of the monistic variety, whose “transcendentalist” fascination with the absolute tends to ignore or subsume the particulars of our material existence; as a result, critical debate often has been limited to assessing the value or consequences of this accepted version of Emersonianism .5 Some have described Emerson’s alleged detachment from the muddy particulars of life as a virtue, like the critics from the “genteel tradition” who, Mitchell argues, viewed Emerson’s idealism as a kind of moral haven cloistered from the amoralities of Gilded Age society,6 or like Louis Mumford, who depicted Emerson as a Romantic champion of the imagination’s power to transform the mundane facts of experience into an ideal truth.7 Much more frequently, however, readers as diverse as Herman Melville, Henry James, George Santayana, T. S. Eliot, Van Wyck Brooks, and, more recently, Irving Howe, David Marr, John Updike, and Bartlett Giamatti, have cited Emerson’s supposed commitment to an abstract idealism in order to dismiss him as philosophically obsolete, w h at ’s t h E usE of r E a dI ng E m E r s on Pr agm at Ic a l ly ?  woefully out of touch with the secular empiricism of the modern world, and morally deficient, a naive optimist who blithely ignores the reality of evil and promotes a socially and politically irresponsible individualism .8 Moreover, as both Lopez and Mitchell ably document, Emerson’s defenders and detractors alike often have used the accepted portrait of Emerson as an abstract idealist...