Irving Howe: The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, February 4, 1987.
A “mist, a cloud, a climate” envelops American culture; Irving Howe calls it “Emersonian.” This cloud does not envelop American politics—or, at least, not so completely. Howe wants to understand what the Emersonians intended to do, what their unconscious motives were and, “pieties apart,” what they can “still mean to us,” a century and a half since Emerson published his seminal essay, “Nature.”
The appeal to nature replaces the appeal to a personal Creator-God—in Emerson’s case, the God of Christianity. By the 1830s, when Emerson resigned from the ministry and began his extraordinary career as a preacher without religion, New England Calvinism had declined, leaving nothing very plausible in its place among its former adherents. Emerson’s own sect, Unitarianism, with its incoherent compromises between revelation and reason, exemplified the implausibility of Puritanism’s successors. Any man of intellectual probity would reject them, but to reject them publicly took social courage as well, and Emerson had that.
Among these spiritual confusions, New Englanders of that time also felt a countervailing self-confidence. In defiance of Europeans’ expectations, the American republic was well established. In Howe’s insightful phrase, that republic “balances limited allotments of power against subterranean yearning for utopia,” with both its moderation and its extremism combining to make people “think they can act to determine their own fate.” “The newness,” as it was called, overbore spiritual anxiety with practical optimism.
Howe understands that Emerson intended to replace the various Christian sects with a new doctrine of his own making. But Howe does not sufficiently consider the significance of the doctrine itself. Emerson would “create himself afresh,” and urge others to do so, “in a perpetual motion of spirit.” How inexplicably finds Emerson’s appeal to be anti-historicist. But Emersonian “Nature” or “God” (he often uses the terms synonymously) is nothing other than Hegel’s Absolute Spirit without dialectic, or, if you prefer, Christian Holy Spirit without personality, and without the other two faces of the Trinity (and therefore without holiness in any recognizable sense). Emerson is anti-historical in his refusal to abide by the dictates of tradition; he respectfully rejects conservatism. But historicism—the belief that each epoch has its own truth, superseding that of previous epochs and to be superseded by that of epochs subsequent to it—frequently appeals to some notion of a ‘spirit’ which, although absoluter, perpetually moves, providing a new ‘absolute’ to each generation. Doctrines of stable essences, such as Platonic ideas, or stable presences, such as the God of the Bible, resist this extreme relativism. Emerson does not—predicting, for example, that Jesus will be superseded (“The Poet,” Essays, Second Series). Howe calls this “a permanent revolution of the spirit,” and reminds us of Marx and Trotsky. Precisely: and they too were historicists. If anything, Emerson was more radically historicist than they, more than Hegel himself, as he anticipated no eschaton, no ‘end of history’ wherein humanity would come to rest.
Howe sees that Emerson “collapsed the distinction between religious and secular, so that the exaltations of the one might be summoned for the needs of the other,” an act Howe wisely finds “more luminous than substantial.” But he wrongly claims that this evidences a “religious” mind, when of course it reveals just the opposite—the utopian mind of a mystagogue of secularism. Howe prefers Emerson’s social and political criticism to his metaphysical doctrine, overlooking the way Emerson’s criticism comes out of the metaphysics, suffering the marks of its origin. Without the metaphysics, which is at least interesting, the criticism would amount to little more than what have become standard ‘progressive’ complaints about private property and military preparedness, seasoned with the heavy spice of moralistic cheerleading when a politically congenial war occurs. Between the metaphysician and the social/political critic is Emerson the moralist, author of “Self-Reliance,” the writer Nietzsche called “the richest in ideas in this century so far.” Howe fails to show why Emerson would interest Nietzsche, and this is no small failing.
Howe writes that Emerson would extend the American Revolution to “the sphere of the spirit.” Yet he criticizes Emerson’s utopianism, his assumption that politics somehow can be bypassed or transcended. This shows that Emerson does not really adhere to the principles of the Revolution. In his appeals to moral sentiment (“self-evident” truths) and to liberty from old forms of oppression, Emerson does resemble Thomas Jefferson, but he lacks Jefferson’s toughness, his political realism. Jefferson never imagines that the moral example of a disarmed country could prove a practical defense against would-be invaders. Emerson did.
The self-reliant Emersonian individualist, turning inward and shedding social claims, unifies himself with the ever-changing Absolute, that is, with a radically non-individualist force. Howe portrays Emerson as being forced reluctantly from this unusual individualism by moral anxiety over slavery. Emerson had always conceived of the Absolute as not only true and good, but as morally good, with immediate, practical guidance for each person. This utopian assumption rounded on itself by forcing Emerson “into the commonplace world of politics, reform, compromise.” “Insofar as Emerson was becoming a reformer pretty much like other reformers, his essential project, the glory of his younger years, had to dwindle.” Further, the rise of industrial society, wherein self-reliance had to give way to collective action, made Emerson increasingly irrelevant; “the factory worker could assert himself as a man,” Howe contends, “only by joining in common action with his fellow workers.” Emerson, then, both succumbed to politics and failed to become political enough.
With all due suspicion of the partisan socialist edge on this critique, one ought nonetheless to acknowledge Howe’s acuteness here. Still, it must be said that Absolutism did very little to cause Emerson to compromise. His speeches on the Fugitive Slave Law and on John Brown typify what would become standard intellectual-in-politics fare, moralism unrelieved by prudence. Of Lincoln’s brilliant alternation of temporizing and intransigence, Emerson understands very little, and then only after the fact. In a sense, of course, Emerson could only welcome his so-to-speak obsolescence. Historicism must admit the passing of everything, excepting only historicism itself.
“In Emerson we have lost a philosopher,” Nietzsche wrote, lamenting “that such a glorious, great nature, rich in soul and spirit,” had not “gone through some strict discipline, a really scientific education.” There may be something more to it than that. In a very ‘Nietzschean’ passage in “Experience,” Emerson asks, “What help from thought? Nature is not dialectic.” Life’s “chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without questioning.” But any philosopher, including Nietzsche, enjoys what he finds, with questioning. Emerson remains an intellectual (America’s first) and not a philosopher because he knows and questions too little. He affirms and negates, preacher-like. The ‘divinity’ this preacher/prophet reveals resembles the ‘god’ of the philosophers, or nature; it the Hegelian/historicist revision, nature then becomes evolutionary, an instantiation of the Absolute Spirit. But in Emerson it comes to light unphilosophically, that is, in a manner distorted by caprice.
The part of American culture our intellectuals represent habitually arrays itself against American politics. Its absolutist moralizing rests on neither divine revelation nor reason, and therefore veers between vehement assertion and relativist lassitude. Arbitrary strictures, most of them merely fashionable, have too little reality about them to effect much serious political change or conservatism. At most (and therefore at worst) they unhinge the minds of practical men from practical realities, while obscuring principles from almost everyone.
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