J: "The American Scholar" (Emerson)

Hello Donald,

An overdue start to an old project! I’m happy to begin looking at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The American Scholar” with you. In so many ways, it’s appropriate to begin with ‘beginnings,’ and perhaps so with ourselves as well. So let me immediately confess to odd feelings towards the man. If for no other reason, Emerson looms over American literature for one basic fact: he was the first to insist upon the naked importance of ideas for Americans – and not just for imaginative literature or for educated people alone. What Emerson’s brand of idealism precisely amounts to over the course of his essays, lectures, and poems remains not so important, I think, as that primal notion of ideas’ fundamental importance and effective power within the national identity. Two very appealing senses of anti-elitism and basic possibility circumvent whatever other reservations dog the American intellectual heritage: ideas are important to one whether or not they consider themselves intellectuals (or secular intellectuals), and anyone can – at any moment – become an idealist and develop personally and immediately as such. (Richard Hofstadter, Sacvan Bercovitch, and Perry Miller have explored at length these notions.) Emerson speaks beautifully of “the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more” as “an indestructible instinct.” I admire this sentiment enormously. However, the pragmatist, idealist, and/or touchstone beloved of philosophers and literary critics such as Stanley Cavell, Richard Poirer, Harold Bloom, and Cornel West escapes me. I always have the feeling that I should enjoy reading Emerson more than I do, or that he should somehow seem more important or more profound or – to put it very crudely – more useable as an influence. I want something more than the personified intellectual and the national ambitions enabling Whitman later on. But I always stumble on Emerson’s style.

Any discussion of Emerson should begin with the strangeness of the prose, I think. Much can be said about the specific genre of the essays: the gross majority began as lectures and sermons delivered before an audience. That is, they fulfil various performative needs and were gradually reworked over time on the lecture circuit. (Emerson after all did earn his income this way.) Reading his essays silently leaves a lot of gaps or silences then. If I wanted to be clever, I’d describe the style as radial: each sentence bounds out from a central premise or two, sticking out at right angles before a grand circumference fills itself in over time. No ‘A’ to ‘B’ work, in other words. At its best, the Emersonian style instead consists of thesis laid upon strikingly original thesis (i.e. the deserved stuff of aphorisms and commonplace books). This can be an overwhelming experience: that may be the point. Reading the essays in a linear fashion then – and at some speed, say slower than we can read them aloud – can be disorientating in another way then. It recalls to my mind an avant-garde trend of nineties’ poetry and (please forgive me, Donald) the later work of John Ashbery: namely, ‘sentencing’ or leaving gaps between independent clauses. (Think back to those lines of Whitman hanging together by anaphora. Emerson often employs periodic sentences and hypotaxis as well.) The reader ideally intuits the non-discursive ‘jumps’ or gaps between the sentences, the point being a more involved or active manner of reading and transmission of knowledge and experience – not to mention a moment for Emerson to literally catch his breath.

Sideburns like Samson

Ideally then: Emerson’s style is both demanding and leaves little point-by-point reassurance of ‘overarching’ themes, apart from what he periodically tells the reader they are. Whether this is freeing, exasperating, mystifying, or at times even coercive must be left to our own judgment. Reading Emerson, I personally run the whole gamut of reactions. Perhaps that’s another intended effect; the line between being inspired and being overwhelmed runs pretty thin, as perhaps it ought. Yet I find it accordingly difficult to discuss Emerson for this same reason. From the early works on through to the last – to my mind anyway – his writing breaks down into these discrete sentences or mini-theses which only later fall into place of the assembled essay. To move from the latter to the form instead risks clumsy paraphrasing, I think: no need to reconstruct the man’s words. On the other hand, the aphoristic style may lead to the temptation of pulling together a bunch of quotes, reordering them to suit, and making our very own, tailored little versions of Emerson. (Read: like most any Adorno criticism! And certain other works I know you don’t like, Donald.) So here are some very tentative, very local observations and problems to share with you, which hopefully we can bounce around a bit:

1. The American Scholar supersedes the “decent, indolent, complaisant” scholar, according to Emerson. And to a great extent, the former emerges precisely from this contradistinction. The latter is obviously something of a self-creation, not to mention an idealized notion of the ‘dead from the waist down’ nineteenth-century scholar (i.e., “They are often virtually disfranchised; and, indeed, there are advocates for their celibacy.”) Some interesting historical grounds lurk here: we shouldn’t forget that Emerson (a Harvard man) was addressing students (Harvard students). The address was first given in 1837, before the introduction of the modern seminar system and pedagogies imported from German philology, historians, and universities (most memorably described in The Education of Henry Adams, Adams being himself partly responsible for this trend at Harvard in the 1870s). But what does the lower-case scholar actually do then, other than just sit around being tenured and passively read books in the ivory tower? (Or Oxford?) For Emerson, this “degenerate” figure, “when the victim of society, … tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.” He falls prey to superabundant, Bloomian influences avant la lettre, from books to nature to history. “Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred years” while “The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius.” (Note the word ‘genius’: obviously, Emerson is using it in a wider sense than we often do ourselves today but it’s still interesting to see that dull or thorough scholarship as such does not figure into the equation.)

Moreover, “There goes in the world a notion, that the scholar should be a recluse, a valetudinarian, as unfit for any handiwork or public labor, as a penknife for an axe. The so-called `practical men' sneer at speculative men, as if, because they speculate or see, they could do nothing …. the rough, spontaneous conversation of men they do not hear, but only a mincing and diluted speech.” But these aspersions may be called for in the end, according to Emerson, insofar as a cultural divide opens up between “speculative” and “practical” men to the latter’s disadvantage and “ignorance”:

“Fear always springs from ignorance. It is a shame to [the scholar] if his tranquillity, amid dangerous times, arise from the presumption, that, like children and women, his is a protected class; or if he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in the flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep his courage up. So is the danger a danger still; so is the fear worse.”

And in fact for Emerson, all these forms of paralysis – intellectual and social – can combine to entirely rob the word “scholar” of any meaning whatsoever: “Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind,” he concludes near the end of the address.

This is precisely the sort of rough summary I hate to provide, but it illustrates something that otherwise passes unmentioned. Not scholarship itself but a peculiar relation to scholarship characterizes what Emerson wishes to avoid. Outside that rather free-floating, cure-all notion of “Nature” (…), he doesn’t particularly link it to any sort of especially American phenomenon. Rather, I should call it a sort of New World supersessionism finding expression in a particular venue. Otherwise, the precise criticisms Emerson levels against  (career) ‘scholars’ remain perennial both for Americans consciously following after and others back in Europe.

"You spin me right 'round, baby / right 'round like record, baby ..."

2. Is the word ‘scholar’ simply an synonym for ‘intellectual’ then? It seems mortifying simple to ask, but I think it is a real point of confusion in the essay whenever Emerson tries to posit a relation between thinking, institutions, and societies. The “American” scholar in turn reveals itself as a scholar (as we might use the term) plus something else. What is that something else then? In a word of Emerson’s own devising: action. There’s a specific call for not so much for activist scholarship (i.e. the tackling of “politics or vexed questions) as character development and, perhaps, a presence in larger society. The “ambitious soul” of the American Scholar thus “sits down before each refractory fact; one after another, reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on for ever to animate the last fibre of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight” almost alone. There’s a lot to be said here about Rousseau, romanticism, &c., but I think it’s striking to see how little a role learning or education play here.

Rather, Emerson’s scholar moves to action, or towards something additional to the tasks and duties of the regular ‘scholar’ or intellectual as such:

“Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.”

This notion carries beyond the academy, so to speak, as “the one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.”

This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence, it is progressive.”

There’s a political notion, even apart from the vocabulary! Everything else – such as an education – merely prepares for ‘action’. “Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to impart his truths? He can still fall back on this elemental force of living them. This is a total act.” And this, of course, looks and sounds perilously like the daydreaming of a bookworm if not something worse. Action here can mean nothing more ore less than power.

3. What is Emerson’s “action” then, outside of private life? Leaving aside the more sinister implications – which are frankly rather unfair in context if not also anachronistic to a degree – we might say that it’s the chance to redefine the historical and intellectual parameters of the day. “Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.” There’s a finely-implied notion of necessary revisionism to shake off that Bloomian influence or “the mind of the Past, — in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed.”

Here’s that notion of “progressive” movement then in calibrating the mind and society to the present moment towards productive (whatever that may mean) ends: “The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they, — let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.” As such, the American Scholar’s work also runs against orthodoxy and engrained notions:

For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature. He is one, who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart. [Italics mine]

Not to go too deeply into this, but I suppose the supreme example of the successful Emersonian would be the counter-cultural figure who eventually redirects the mainstream to some purposeful end. There are tons of ways to do that though, again, none of them necessarily depend upon scholarship, good scholarship, or what’s necessarily come before.

4. Lastly, there are some interesting notions of reading at play in “The American Scholar.” As seen above, books can simply pose a character-building exercise whereby one conquers the past and grows into an assertive self.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

"... of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh." (Eccl. 12:12)

A related sense then runs towards ‘priming the pump,’ so to speak:

Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must, — when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining, — we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we may speak.

Regardless, one does not read for any historical awareness or for the pleasure of encountering the past. (That would to some degree show present values up as relative – the big shadow behind Emerson’s thought.) Accordingly, “We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the most modern joy, — with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses” [author’s italics].

Nor does one truly read to develop one’s powers of empathy, that rather hoary goal of writing fiction; what empathy may come about is instrumental and, in a deep sense, incidental as well. The scholar “then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated.” Reading this brought to mind earlier, colder notions of literature belonging to an older time, i.e. reading as active preparation to power or influence on others (action?) and passive scepticism to outside influences. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this, so I’d be happy to hear your thoughts, Donald!

And with that far-too-long post from one American Scholar to another, Donald, I leave it to you to shake off the perverse influence of everything I’ve written above. All best, ~ John