Reconstructing Individualism

A Pragmatic Tradition from Emerson to Ellison

James M. Albrecht

• Publisher: American Literatures Initiative
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780823242115
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Pragmatism in Philosophy

America has a love–hate relationship with individualism. In Reconstructing Individualism, James Albrecht argues that our conceptions of individualism have remained trapped within the assumptions of classic liberalism. He traces an alternative genealogy of individualist ethics in four major American thinkers—Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, John Dewey, and Ralph Ellison.These writers' shared commitments to pluralism (metaphysical and cultural), experimentalism, and a melioristic stance toward value and reform led them to describe the self as inherently relational. Accordingly, they articulate models of selfhood that are socially engaged and ethically responsible, and they argue that a reconceived—or, in Dewey's term, "reconstructed"—individualism is not merely compatible with but necessary to democratic community. Conceiving selfhood and community as interrelated processes, they call for an ongoing reform of social conditions so as to educate and liberate individuality, and, conversely, they affirm the essential role individuality plays in vitalizing communal efforts at reform.

Part One

Emerson

One

What’s the Use of Reading Emerson Pragmatically?

The Example of William James

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 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, 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 to suggest that his writings themselves no longer merit any careful interpretation—if they ever did. Emerson’s historical importance is almost universally acknowledged, even as his essays are dismissed as outdated in their ideas, lacking in philosophical logic, and incoherent in terms of literary form. The result has been a remarkable inattention to the very complexities of Emerson’s writings that would complicate and challenge the entrenched caricature of him as an absolute idealist.

Curiously, moreover, Emerson’s supposed absolutism has been described as taking two nearly contradictory forms. As the title of Stephen E. Whicher’s influential study Freedom and Fate indicates, critics have charted in Emerson’s thought a shift from a naive affirmation of individual power, in his early works, to a more sober focus, in his later works, on the forces that limit the power and autonomy of individual acts.⁹ The “early” Emerson posited by this widely accepted narrative celebrates an autonomous self whose power lies in its ability to access—through the inner promptings of its own “genius,” “soul,” or “moral sentiment”—a divine unity in which we all participate. The “late” Emerson, in contrast, celebrates the material forces that determine our human identities and acts. In short, Emerson is depicted as moving from an absolutist notion of freedom to an absolutist determinism, from a naive optimism that affirms the individual’s ability to transcend and transform the limitations of our material world to a fatalistic optimism that affirms the limitations of our world as necessary parts of a divinely beneficent whole. These absolutist interpretations also shape the most common criticisms of Emerson’s politics: his early idealist emphasis on individual power is seen as renouncing collective politics, and as blaming suffering and inequality on people’s failures to achieve individual regeneration; conversely, his late, fatalistic acquiescence is seen as discouraging political action by reinforcing a laissez-faire faith in the ability of large, impersonal forces to create a moral result.

One prominent trend in recent scholarship extends these long-standing patterns in Emerson criticism. Many critics continue to accept the traditional interpretation of Emerson’s thought and focus their efforts on reassessing its political consequences within a given historical or ideological context. For example, Sacvan Bercovitch’s argument that Emerson shifted from a “utopian” critique of capitalism to an “ideological” apology for capitalism updates the Whicherian opposition between Emerson’s early idealism and late acquiescence. Myra Jehlen, in contrast, has asserted that Emerson’s individualism always existed in a contradictory relationship with the fatalistic implications of his monism. Because Emerson views truth as absolute and wholly independent of human actions—so Jehlen’s argument goes—he concludes that we have access to truth only through our preexisting harmony with or intuition of nature, and that our actions merely express or replicate this truth. This severe proscription of human creativity provides, according to Jehlen, a powerful metaphysical support for the amorality of capitalism: it simultaneously removes any responsibility for political action (since nature does not need human reforms or revolutions) and authorizes economic and nationalistic expansion (since nature comprehends all such activity). Similarly, Christopher Newfield contends that the theme of self-transcendence or abandonment that runs throughout Emerson’s writings encourages submission to the “benevolent despotism” of American democracy, which substitutes oligarchy and consumerism in place of any meaningful collective control, while Dana Nelson has argued that Emerson’s theory of “great men” supports an antidemocratic submission to the “representativity” of American presidential politics. All of these approaches exhibit what Richard Teichgraeber has astutely diagnosed as the “guiding cliché” of new historicist criticism: “namely, the proposition that what might look like dissent or subversion in literary discourse always turns out to be, on closer inspection, a set of attitudes or ideas that a dominant political and economic order can appropriate to justify and sustain itself.”¹⁰ Perhaps more important, for my purposes, is the fact that these writers’ assessments of the political and ideological implications of Emerson’s individualism remain trapped within an outdated interpretive paradigm that assumes his thought oscillates between the absolutist poles of an idealistic and a fatalistic optimism.

There exists, of course, an influential countertrend in Emerson criticism, one that, over the past thirty years, has reasserted Emerson’s status as a central figure in American thought—and, indeed, as an underappreciated influence on Continental thought—not despite, but because of the ideas explored in his essays. Where so many critics have bemoaned a lack of philosophical logic or coherence, these critics have seen a deliberate emphasis on the complexity, contradiction, and antagonism that characterizes experience. Where others have proclaimed a lack of literary form, these critics have traced a rhetorical strategy that mirrors Emerson’s interest in antagonism, action, and transition. And where others have seen an absolute idealist, these critics have found a thinker who explores the possibilities for power that exist within and against the limitations of the cultural and material environment—an Emerson whose vision of the limited yet sufficient opportunities for human agency and power prefigures the philosophy of American pragmatism.

To be sure, the idea that Emerson’s thought has a significant pragmatic strain is not new, having been voiced by earlier critics such as Kenneth Burke and Frederic Carpenter,¹¹ not to mention by James and Dewey themselves. But the most influential figures in the recent rediscovery of a pragmatic Emerson have been Stanley Cavell, Richard Poirier, and Harold Bloom. Cavell perhaps has done the most to assert Emerson’s importance as a philosopher. Identifying a series of related concerns in Emerson’s thought—an embrace of ordinary language and experience, of “onward” or “aversive” thinking, and of moral perfectionism—Cavell has argued that Emerson is not a builder of philosophical systems, but rather a thinker who practices philosophy as “a mode of thought that undertakes to bring philosophy to an end,” anticipating the projects of thinkers such as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. For Poirier, Emerson exemplifies a tradition in which literary performance—the reshaping of inherited language and literary conventions—dramatizes the self’s fundamental desire to express itself by engaging and reinflecting the resistant cultural and material environment. Poirier has cogently detailed how this Emersonian stress on performance—with its emphasis on action and transition, and its rejection of the desire for metaphysical certainty—has deep affinities with the pragmatism of William James. Finally, Bloom has described Emerson as the founder of the American difference in Romanticism, a writer whose pragmatic emphasis on knowing as an act of power and will leads him to employ a rhetoric of discontinuity in which the self is a “voice” that “splinter[s] and destroy[s] its own texts,” a rhetoric that Bloom reads as a quintessentially American, and proto-Nietzschean, rebellion against the continuities of historical time and tradition.¹²

While these writers have helped to reestablish the connections between Emerson and pragmatism, they do not resolve the question of how far, and to what purpose, one can claim the “pragmatic” character of Emerson’s thought. Indeed, Cavell—in an essay whose titular question asks, “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?”—worries that stressing the pragmatic aspects of Emerson’s thought risks erasing the distinctiveness of his philosophical achievement, or, worse, of replicating the all-too-familiar gesture of Emerson criticism, that of proclaiming his historical importance and influence only to imply that his thought is somehow inadequate or obsolete:

To my mind, to understand Emerson as essentially the forerunner of pragmatism is perhaps to consider pragmatism as representing more effectively or rationally what Emerson had undertaken to bring to these shores. This is the latest in the sequence of repressions of Emerson’s thought by the culture he helped to found, of what is distinctive in that thought. Such a repression has punctuated Emerson’s reputation from the first moment he could be said to have acquired one.¹³

In other words, in stressing the pragmatic elements of Emerson’s vision, there is a danger of perpetuating the idea that his thought is somehow deficient if taken on its own, that his ideas are not really coherent until they are incorporated in the more consistent pragmatic logic of a James or Dewey. If Cavell and Poirier have taught us anything, it is the impudence of condescending to a writer as capacious and complex as Emerson. As Poirier asserts, we must not treat Emerson “as anything less than the great and difficult writer he is, as a writer who has already anticipated any degree of sophistication that might be brought to him.”¹⁴ The challenge for critics who would place Emerson in a genealogy of American pragmatism, then, is to avoid the pitfall of reducing Emerson to less than the still-relevant, still-indispensable thinker that he is, the rare kind of writer who requires us to return to him again and again, and always rewards us when we are willing to assume the complexity of his thought and follow it where it leads.

In response to Cavell’s question, then, I would contend that there are important benefits to be gained not by calling Emerson a pragmatist, which would be anachronistic, but by reading Emerson pragmatically—by applying the fundamental methods and attitudes of pragmatism in order to highlight the ways in which similar attitudes are already present in, and central to, Emerson’s vision. There are political reasons for placing Emerson at the head of a pragmatic tradition that runs through James to twentieth-century writers like Dewey, Burke, and Ralph Ellison, for this tradition highlights what are, in my estimation, the most politically valuable aspects of Emerson’s individualism, while also revising and augmenting his ethics to meet urgent ethical challenges posed by our contemporary world. Demonstrating the political value of placing Emerson at the head of a specifically pragmatic tradition of individualist ethics is a task for this book as a whole. I can outline here, however, a second major benefit of reading Emerson pragmatically. Instead of depicting Emerson, as Cavell fears, as a merely incipient or incoherent pragmatist, reading Emerson pragmatically provides the clearest refutation to the central assumption that has been used to assert the incoherence of his thought: the charge, outlined above, that the potential pluralism of his individualist ethics is undermined by the absolutist optimism of his early idealism and his later fatalism. A pragmatic approach to Emerson helps reveal the anti-absolutist balance that lies at the heart of his vision—a vision of human power and agency as existing in an antagonistic relation within and against the limits of our material existence; a vision that is expressed with remarkable consistency in Emerson’s early and late works alike. William James’s pragmatic method for mediating between the absolutist oppositions of traditional philosophy points the way to such a pragmatic reading of Emerson, as is evidenced in the way that James himself approached Emerson’s writings.

Emerson’s influence on James is well established.¹⁵ Emerson was a friend of Henry James Sr., and made occasional visits to the James household—during one of which he “blessed” the infant William. At a youthful age, James was exposed to Emerson’s writings through his father’s library, and through evenings in which his father read Emerson’s essays aloud to the family. In his personal copies of Emerson’s works (the first of which he obtained in 1871), James marked numerous passages, made marginal notes, and compiled indexed lists of quotes—in pencil, blue pencil, and black ink, suggesting that he read Emerson carefully several times over the course of his career.¹⁶ Perhaps most importantly, James reread nearly all of Emerson’s collected works—no small feat—in preparation for delivering an address during the 1903 centennial celebration of Emerson’s birth. He wrote to his brother Henry that “reading of the divine Emerson, volume after volume, has done me a lot of good,” and to another correspondent he remarked that “reading the whole of him over again continuously has made me feel his greatness as I never did before. He’s really a critter to be thankful for.”¹⁷ Emerson was thus freshly in James’s mind during the important years 1904 to 1907, when he published essays later collected as Essays in Radical Empiricism and wrote the lecture series later published as Pragmatism.

Moreover, as Frederic Carpe...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. “Individualism Has Never Been Tried”: Toward a Pragmatic Individualism
• Part I. Emerson
• 1. What’s the Use of Reading Emerson Pragmatically?: The Example of William James
• 2. “Let Us Have Worse Cotton and Better Men”: Emerson’s Ethics of Self-Culture
• Part II. Pragmatism: James and Dewey
• 3. Moments in the World’s Salvation: James’s Pragmatic Individualism
• 4. Character and Community: Dewey’s Model of Moral Selfhood
• 5. “The Local Is the Ultimate Universal”: Dewey on Reconstructing Individuality and Community
• Part III. A Tragicomic Ethics in the Emersonian Vein: Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison
• 6. Saying Yes and Saying No: Individualist Ethics in Ellison and Burke
• Notes
• Series List