The Independent Scholar

Reading Emerson’s address, 'The American Scholar,' it’s easy, with the many exhortions and quotable epigrams posed, to miss the fact that little is said about the status of the peculiarly 'American' scholar.  One might suppose that the original audience waited to hear something like a prospective for what a scholar of their time, to be truly American, might be supposed to study or teach or learn.  Instead, Emerson spends most of the address outlining an approach to developing the mind that stresses the proper relation to nature, books, and action—all as a means to learn—and then to the duty of the scholar, which is to cultivate independence and to learn patience: 'Patience,—patience;—with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace, the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work, the study of the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world.'  What Emerson, from the perspective of our time, seems more readily to be describing is the condition of the 'independent scholar,' an instance of  'Man Thinking' that might well exist outside of institutions, curricula, professional organizations and of any particular nation.

Emerson’s program, as ever, seems aimed at something we might conceive of as much more creative than we generally consider scholarship to be.  His is a program for making one’s mind uniquely one’s own—and thus, if we are Americans, uniquely American.  As he says in 'Self-Reliance': 'Nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of our own mind.'  That sanctity is what he prizes more than anything that we might consider a 'body of knowledge.'  What motivates Emerson is the hope that there is something more to knowledge, to learning, than simply the facts of the history of a particular country or of  science and technology as the 'know-how' that changes the quality of life.  To know all there is to know about the world is not to understand it. For that, one must have a clear intuition, one must have thought, and thought is not best understood as a grasp of what is, for some purpose, but rather as a response to what is or has been, a manner of thinking.  What we find in the world—nature as environment, books as goads and, sometimes, solace, action as expenditure of force to some end—makes its inroads on us and shapes us, but we are is what we think and say about our condition.

The American scholar, then, is one who is shaped by the status of America as a modern state, as a collectivity arrived at through shared nomenclatures rather than through imposed hierarchies.  The world Emerson embraces is not wholly egalitarian—in 'Self-Reliance' he is almost as impatient as Nietzsche with the notion that the common man is king, or that the purpose of culture is to serve what Nietzsche calls 'the many-too-many.'  The edge in 'Self-Reliance' comes from the recognition that to rely upon oneself is ultimately to deny a certain easy community with others.  As he says, in response to the exhortation of his 'obligation to put all poor men in good situations.  Are they my poor?  I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong . . . the education at college of fools . . . alms to sots.'

Besides delighting in the irascibleness of Emerson here, I have to admit that I hear a certain reactionary glibness that I recognize as truly American, for if anything strikes me as true to the nature of 'the American genius' it is its ability to be all-inclusive and progressive when it suits its mood to 'move with the times,' and to be exclusive, denying, and conservative when it wants to appear tough and exacting as any old miser.  'Self-Reliance' is a great prose poem of attitudes that sustain, at all times, America’s attitudes about its own uniqueness, its own certainty that its judgments are right, that 'I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right,' that Europe and other countries are at best a spectacle for the American’s amusement, and so on.

With that mention of 'intrinsic right' Emerson catches the perspective of America as the land of rights moreso than of obligations, and, though Emerson is claiming, as ever, his valuing of the individual’s right to be himself, the tone of his statements, if applied to a collectivity—emphasizing the 'American' in 'American Scholar'—can make us wonder if we aren’t hearing the rationale for American exceptionalism at its most virulent.  And that, I would suggest, is why we have to keep re-reading 'The American Scholar': to see if we’ve heard the message correctly.  When Emerson posits going beyond the past, rather than being held hostage to it, he states the perspective every new generation, every new innovative method, theory or discovery has held, whether in the arts, in ethics and law, in technology and science, or even, as he tries to suggest, in methods of education and study.  We could easily dismiss Emerson by simply trusting his judgment: the Americans of his day did not need to pay lip service to the great European past any more than the Americans of our day need concern themselves with New England Transcendentalism, and, indeed, being free of a burden not one’s own is to be commended in Emerson’s scheme of things.  The question then becomes: does Emerson still belong to us?  Do we find him to be of the kind of sustaining thought we need to imagine something that has not already occurred?  Is he wholly of the past, or still speaking to our future?

In some of your references, John, to those who have found merit and food for thought in Emerson, I have to admit some of the sources of my own willingness to recognize—and re-cognize—the Sage of Concord.  In a graduate seminar led by Cornel West on Humean skepticism I first read Stanley Cavell, who reads Emerson in the wake of Wittgenstein, and also around that time read Richard Poirier’s Emersonian considerations of American literature.  Recently, a very worthwhile essay in n+1 on 'Cavell as Educator' by Mark Greif speaks, among other things, of Cavell’s concept of perfectionism, a project of self-improvement that owes much to Emerson.  I’ll let Greif explain the idea:

“What Cavell ultimately named ‘moral’ or ‘Emersonian’ perfectionism is oriented to an interior dynamism.  It does not displace the kind of moral philosophy that addresses lying, theft, saving lives, and letting die.  It does not dispute the title of such issues to the name of ethics.  It simply wants me to admit that, day to day, I have very little occasion to decide when three lives may be taken to save five, or whether it is right to steal radium for my ailing spouse.  Whereas, morally, there isn’t a day that goes by that doesn’t involve some perfectionist reflection on what persons and things around me would call me to do, if I were to become different, new, and better—not because of their spoken demands but by their example, positive or negative, of other forms of life than mine, and my decision whether it would be conformity or growth, death or life, to become like them.”

The passage may be a bit prolix, but what strikes me as very germane to our discussion of Emerson is the idea that moral perfection, in his view, has much to do with what we find ourselves obligated to do.  Do we feel bound to solve every problem others throw at us, or do we feel it a right to care about only those to whom we belong?  Do we wish to solve our problems as others have done or expect us to, or will we only be satisfied with what is unique and original in our own thinking?  Emerson, to my mind, makes of these questions the basis for a prospect of, more than 'self-improvement' in our contemporary sense, what Nietzsche calls 'self-overcoming': the notion that one is called by one’s higher potential to move beyond whatever level one has achieved.  Emerson is a goad against the complacency of the American scholar, critic, thinker, or artist who thinks that something has been achieved equal to the desire, the will, for something better still.

Ultimately, then, I’m sympathetic with your uneasiness with Emerson, in the sense of being perplexed and frustrated with a style that never stays long with any one statement, that is able to twist and turn without ever seeming to exhaust the idea he’s expounding.  I think of this style as meditative and reflective rather than expository or argumentative and find that’s it best to interrogate what he’s saying by deciding on its applicability to one's own situation.  While it’s true that his manner lends itself to 'commonplace book' quotations, I think it’s also true that Emerson is able to express thoughts in such a way that one admires the presence of mind in the statement and finds that the quality of the thought, in its mercurial address to many possible situations, remains fresh and striking.  Is this 'useable'?  I can’t say, but much depends on what one wants to use it for.  For me, the use value of Emerson is the goad of becoming a better essayist.  Not an 'independent scholar' simply in the sense of not affiliated with certain commercial or intellectual or political requirements, but also 'independent' in the expression of one’s thought.  To write as Emerson writes is to write with the individuality of one’s own mind paramount.  This, whatever else it might be, is a useful example, it seems to me, whether or not it is useable.

Granted, there isn’t a lot of specificity in his attack on the career scholar, but I think it’s easy enough to extrapolate illustrations for the pedant unconcerned by usefulness or by originality or by providing some element of thought that would inspire others.  The quality of many of those you mention as Emersonians is that they stake out a unique territority and make it their own, and in so doing produce work that is independent in the sense I’m aiming at above.  The problem of Emerson, the greatest challenge and occasion he provides, it seems to me, is the finding of one’s own thought within his or between the lines of his, so that one reads along with him always looking past his examples to find one nearer home, a challenge more fit for one’s own thought.