Understanding Emerson

"The American Scholar" and His Struggle for Self-Reliance

Kenneth S. Sacks

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691223681
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A seminal figure in American literature and philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson is considered the apostle of self-reliance, fully alive within his ideas and disarmingly confident about his innermost thoughts. Yet the circumstances around "The American Scholar" oration--his first great public address and the most celebrated talk in American academic history--suggest a different Emerson. In Understanding Emerson, Kenneth Sacks draws on a wealth of contemporary correspondence and diaries, much of it previously unexamined, to reveal a young intellectual struggling to define himself and his principles.
Caught up in the fierce dispute between his Transcendentalist colleagues and Harvard, the secular bastion of Boston Unitarianism and the very institution he was invited to honor with the annual Phi Beta Kappa address, Emerson agonized over compromising his sense of self-reliance while simultaneously desiring to meet the expectations of his friends. Putting aside self-doubts and a resistance to controversy, in the end he produced an oration of extraordinary power and authentic vision that propelled him to greater awareness of social justice, set the standard for the role of the intellectual in America, and continues to point the way toward educational reform. In placing this singular event within its social and philosophical context, Sacks opens a window into America's nineteenth-century intellectual landscape as well as documenting the evolution of Emerson's idealism.
Engagingly written, this book, which includes the complete text of "The American Scholar, " allows us to appreciate fully Emerson's brilliant rebuke of the academy and his insistence that the most important truths derive not from books and observation but from intuition within each of us. Rising defiantly before friend and foe, Emerson triumphed over his hesitations, redirecting American thought and pedagogy and creating a personal tale of quiet heroism.

Chapter One

“THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR”

WHEN EMERSON DELIVERED THE ANNUAL PHI BETA KAPPA address at Harvard, the First Parish Meetinghouse, larger than any campus lecture hall of its day, could barely accommodate the guests. And what important guests they were. The event, according to a contemporary, was “attended generally by a large assembly of the most accomplished and intelligent portions of our community, and not infrequently by distinguished visitors from different parts of the country.” That observer might have added that not infrequently it was also attended by distinguished international visitors, for it was a high point of Harvard’s commencement. Among the presiding alumni on August 31, 1837, were two of the nation’s most prominent public figures, Massachusetts governor Edward Everett and U.S. Supreme Court justice Joseph Story. As was expected of distinguished graduates, both had in previous years delivered their own orations, and they were the powers within the chapter. Famed Unitarian leader William Ellery Channing, who years earlier had modestly declined to speak, understood that addressing Phi Beta Kappa was a singular honor, a rite de passage, in the intellectual society of Cambridge and Boston.¹

Yet Emerson’s own speech, the most famous in American academic history, was somewhat of an accident. He had long considered writing on “the Duty and Discipline of a Scholar,” but had done nothing on it. Then, a mere two months before the event, he was asked to give the Phi Beta Kappa address in place of Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, who, for now unknown reasons, could not.²

The thirty-four-year-old Waldo Emerson, as he called himself, did not yet own the reputation of most previous Phi Beta Kappa orators. Wainwright, for example, had taught at Harvard and was rector of Trinity Church, Boston, and trustee of Columbia University. But Emerson was well-enough known around Cambridge, belonging to a family that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., called one of New England’s “Academic Races.” With several relatives, including his father and three brothers, also alumni, Harvard was his patrimony. As an undergraduate, Waldo, like his brothers, respected authority—no small consideration then. But unlike them, he did not place high in his class. Recollected Charles William Eliot: “He was an omnivorous reader, and an observant and reflective wanderer in the woods and by-ways. He worked on the things that interested him, with companions of his choice, and college duties obstructed him hardly at all.”³

Figure 1. First Parish Meetinghouse, where Emerson delivered “The American Scholar.” Lithograph by James Kidder, c. 1830. Courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum.

Since graduating in 1821 at the then-customary age of eighteen, Emerson conscientiously kept in touch with fellow alums (there were sixty in his class), attended commencement, and helped organize annual reunions. It must have been at one of these that he proved himself a good chum, rising to offer these verses to the president of Harvard:

To jolly old Kirkland we’ll fill the first glass

Whom the bottle did ne’er with impunity pass,

Let us pray to the gods to keep him from harm,

And find him a wife to tuck him up warm.⁴

Like his late father before him, Emerson was popular with classmates. After graduation, he also followed in his father’s footsteps by first working as a teacher and then returning to Harvard for divinity training. And, again like his father, he became a minister of a liberal theology that had just recently taken the name of Unitarianism. But in a crisis of belief and perhaps of life, Emerson soon departed from family tradition. At twenty-nine years old, with the death of his first wife, Ellen, whom during their seventeen months together he loved with poetic abandon, and concerned that he could not longer administer the sacraments with sincere faith, he gave up his pulpit at Boston’s Second Church (in earlier days home to Increase and Cotton Mather). After spending a year abroad, he came to settle in the ancestral village of Concord, which his family, seven generations earlier, had helped found. From there, he began to carve out a speaking career on the newly formed lyceum circuit. Although not yet publishing any of his lectures, he did, in 1836, produce an extensive essay. Nature at least at first sold well, and his talks were just beginning to attract the large audiences he would eventually enjoy. They helped establish him with a group of what became known as Transcendentalists.⁵

It was the year before his Phi Beta Kappa address, on the evening of Harvard’s bicentennial celebration, that the Transcendental Club was formed. Its members shared the belief that the current state of theology and philosophy was “very unsatisfactory.” Over the next four years, until its final meeting in September, 1840, the club met some thirty times at private homes—often Emerson’s—to discuss topics usually of philosophical or religious interest. Its founding members were Frederic Henry Hedge, George Putnam, George Ripley, and Emerson, and they timed their gatherings to coincide with Hedge’s visits from Maine. Along the way, a number of individuals dropped in once or twice, but, of the score or so who attended more regularly, these are the names that will appear here frequently: Hedge, Ripley, Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Orestes Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, Convers Francis, Theodore Parker, Caleb Stetson, Samuel Osgood, John Sullivan Dwight, and William Henry Channing. Almost all were young, Harvard-trained Unitarian ministers.⁶

The club’s chief organizer, Henry Hedge—son of Levi Hedge, the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity at Harvard—was moved by what he believed to be “a rigid, cautious, circumspect, conservative tang in the very air of Cambridge which no one, who has resided there for any considerable time, can escape.” Hedge merely expressed more candidly what he and George Ripley had long been suggesting in print. The object of their impatience was the Unitarian culture in which they had been raised.⁷

Breaking free at the beginning of the nineteenth century from Trinitarian theology and Calvinist notions of original sin and determinism, Unitarians held to a benevolent, if distant, god, a demonstrably rational world, and the possibility of moral perfection—all validated by a thriving materialistic culture. Many philosophies, especially Scottish Common Sense, contributed to their outlook. But it is in particular John Locke’s notion of the mind as a blank tablet, a tabula rasa, in which consciousness is largely shaped by external experience (though not quite so completely as tabula rasa might suggest), that had the greatest influence on Unitarian beliefs. With the quiet fervor of those who know they are right, Boston clerical, commercial, and academic elite—related to each other by birth or marriage to a degree they made famous—followed British empirical philosophy in defining human thought as directly dependent on the material world.

Within just a few decades, however, their own offspring rebelled against what they saw as a smug certitude, espousing with equal conviction a romantic idealism that favored individual instinct, self-knowledge, and a belief in transcendent, eternal ideas. In his Critique of Pure Reason of 1781, Immanuel Kant had observed that metaphysicians such as Locke were unable to show precisely how external objects shape human perception. And so Kant proposed to do the opposite: “We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the task of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge.” When Kant called his assertion a “Copernican Revolution,” he wasn’t being immodest. European thought since the Enlightenment had depended on the belief that the external world was knowable and predictable. Kant maintained that if the material world appears knowable and predictable, it is largely because the human mind makes it so. The categories of understanding that are intuitive to us all determine the way we perceive what we call reality. Epistemology, recollected James Freeman Clarke, was suddenly turned on its head:

The books of Locke, Priestley, Hartley, and Belsham were in my grandfather Freeman’s library, and the polemic of Locke against innate ideas was one of my earliest philosophical lessons. But something within me revolted at all such attempts to explain soul out of sense, deducing mind from matter. . . . So I concluded I had no taste for metaphysics and gave it up, until Coleridge showed me from Kant that though knowledge begins with experience it does not come from experience. Then I discovered that I was born a transcendentalist.⁸

Although the difference between Lockean acquired and Kantian innate knowledge is somewhat a matter of emphasis, Unitarians and Transcendentalists, as Clarke testified, considered the philosophies incompatible. It is no exaggeration to say in fact that, had they believed in the devil, each would have seen Satan’s hand in the other’s thinking. That was especially so when it came to applying German idealism to religion. Despite being labeled an atheist for his assertion that the human mind determined what it perceived, Kant argued mightily for an ultimately unknowable, though omnipresent, god. But it was British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his 1825 work Aids to Reflection, who conveyed to American Transcendentalists the spiritual side of Kant’s system that proved most influential to them. Coleridge somewhat misleadingly reduced Kant’s theory of human cognition to a sharp dichotomy between Reason, which is common to all humanity and contains intuition and the inherent moral faculties, and Understanding, which evaluates the material world and thus varies among individuals. Because we can never be certain of transient external perceptions, the innate and eternal moral sentiments provided by Reason transcend (hence: Transcendentalism) what we learn through Understanding. A pious Anglican, Coleridge argued that Reason—which separates us from all other living things—reveals to humanity the mysteries of Christian faith.⁹

American Transcendentalists followed Coleridge in seeing the reflection of God within human Reason. Many of them also continued to believe in Jesus’s divine nature, while some, especially Emerson, Alcott, and Parker, considered his ministry simply representative of the best of humanity. But all believed that the miracles he performed were perceived through human Understanding and thus susceptible to misinterpretation. His physical deeds, therefore, could not be the measure of his accomplishments. Rather, it was how his words awakened sentiments residing in human Reason that gave Jesus’s message its eternal value. Trusting that all important knowledge is self-knowledge, Transcendentalists argued against the significance of historically based miracles. Not coincidentally, at precisely the same moment empirically minded Unitarians, armed with new methods of evaluating the Bible (originating, ironically, in Germany), were busy insisting on the centrality of Jesus’s miracles to Christian theology.

During the next decade, the Transcendentalist challenge to Unitarianism and its chief secular institution, Harvard, would turn increasingly bitter. By the nineteenth century, philosophy had established a secure place alongside and in support of theology. Just as today the relative truths in the literary canon are debated in public (for which Emerson is largely responsible), philosophical disputes were then considered of great and pressing moment by the general populace. The so-called miracles controversy, for example, was fought not only in professional books and journals, but in daily newspapers, with lay readers, clergy, and academics alike contributing letters and articles. When the Harvard-Unitarian establishment proclaimed Transcendentalism “the new heresy,” public diatribes and spiteful accusations were hurled from all sides. Before being overshadowed by the great cause of abolitionism, the conflict transformed what it meant to be an American intellectual. Beginning with “The American Scholar,” Emerson placed himself at the center of the new vision and yet to the side of most of the conflict.¹⁰

But much of this lay in the future, for the young rebels were still developing their beliefs and determining how theirs differed from those of their teachers. Despite existing tensions, the Transcendental Club was probably not formed in direct opposition to Harvard. The alma mater was not even a formal topic of discussion until three years later, and by then the situation had changed dramatically. Hedge’s initial proposal to Emerson in 1836 was that friends should meet at least once a year, when they gathered for Harvard’s commencement. After some hesitation, Emerson agreed, so long as there was no defining agenda: “The rule suggested by the club,” Emerson affirmed, “was this, that no man should be admitted whose presence excluded any one topic.”¹¹

Although affiliation with the Transcendental Club might have been viewed suspiciously by members of Phi Beta Kappa, as a substitute orator Emerson had some appeal. Elected in 1828 as one of the first graduate initiates, he participated actively, even enjoying the administrative and political aspects of the society. Sentiment was on Emerson’s side, for two of his brothers, both of whom had achieved brilliantly as undergraduates and had been elected to the chapter, had recently met premature deaths (Edward in 1834 and Charles in 1836).¹²

Yet, a young Transcendentalist had to have more than mere sentiment to recommend his selection as speaker. We don’t know for certain what happened when Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright suddenly informed the society that he could not give the Phi Beta Kappa oration. But although no one has since thought to ask, it’s easy to guess. The chapter’s by-laws of 1825 stipulated that a seven-person Committee on Appointments select the annual orator. In 1837, the vice president of the society happened to be Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham, Harvard overseer and brother-in-law of Governor Everett. Succeeding Emerson’s late father as minister of the First Church, he had deep and abiding affection for the Emerson family, especially for Waldo. Frothingham had already proved himself sufficiently independent-minded that Transcendentalists had invited him to join their club. Although he demurred, he soon began sounding like one of their own. Frothingham wrote Emerson a note that August: “Good luck for Commencement & the day after!—particularly the latter, say I” (meaning of course the Phi Beta Kappa oration). As the senior-most member of the Committee on Appointments and almost certainly its chair, he would have had the most influence in determining the orator. The committee also included George Bradford, Emerson’s lifelong friend and a member of the Transcendental Club, as well as James Walker, who did not attend but had been invited to join the club. Even C. C. Felton who, as the society’s corresponding secretary, also sat on the committee, contributed to George Ripley’s Transcendentalist-inspired series Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature. The initial choice of Wainwright was unexceptional. But when it became possible to introduce a new voice, perhaps on the sly, as the decision was made in summer when few would pay attention, Frothingham and friends made the most of the opportunity.¹³

His selection had to surprise Emerson, and the first question that must have occurred to him was: what type of oration should he deliver? The appointments committee was composed of moderate men. If they desired to hear a new voice, it should stimulate but not offend. Other Transcendentalists, such as Ripley and Hedge, were more accomplished than Emerson and might have merited consideration as speaker. But they had publicly attacked Harvard and Unitarian belief, while Emerson always appeared circumspect and soft-spoken. Three years previously, in fact, he had delivered the Phi Beta Kappa poem, and his offering was quite co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One: “The American Scholar”
• Chapter Two: America in “The American Scholar”
• Chapter Three: The Scholar Transformed
• Chapter Four: Self-Reliance
• Chapter Five: Friends
• Chapter Six: Alcott
• Chapter Seven: Forever the American Scholar
• Appendix: Text of “The American Scholar”
• Abbreviations Used in the Notes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index