Emerson’s Transcendental Gaze and the ‘Disagreeable Particulars’ of Slavery: Vision and the Costs of Idealism (original) (raw)
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Polity, 2016
Scholars have not reconciled Emerson’s anti-political individualism with his newly rediscovered abolitionism. I unite the apolitical and political Emerson by showing this separation is temporal. Solitude prefaces politics. I first explain Emerson’s solitary contemplation as imagination that reveals interpersonal obligations. Second, I show how these obligations draw the thinker back to politics, and in Emerson’s case, to abolitionism, where he advocated small conversations to encourage others to contemplation and then action. Conversation did not convert hostile slaveholders, but third, I note Emerson admired the abolitionists who attempted this moral suasion in the South at great personal risk. Their political activism exemplified self-reliance while in society.
The World’s Eye, the World’s Heart: Frederick Douglass and the Transcendence from Slavery
2018
In nineteenth-century America, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The American Scholar” finds a satisfying manifestation in Frederick Douglass’ autobiographical Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. A careful examination reveals Douglass to be the epitome of Emerson’s “Man Thinking,” a distinction which allows Douglass to escape slavery in a thoroughly transcendental way. In “The American Scholar,” Emerson expounds upon the deficits in the American education system, in particular, passive knowledge consumption. In an attempt to correct this deficit, Emerson enumerates the qualifications necessary to achieve the pinnacle of American scholarship, which he calls “Man Thinking.” Emerson claims that a man must be in touch with nature, he must explore the past through books, he must activate his soul, and he must use his new knowledge to take action and produce change. Douglass reaches each of the essential phases and meets all necessary requirement...
RALPH WALDO EMERSON LAST OF THE ANTI-SLAVERY LECTURES 1 (EXCERPT
...Now, gentlemen I have lived all my life without suffering any known inconvenience from American Slavery. I never saw it, except a glimpse of it I caught in my youth in Florida and Carolina, but to little purpose then. I never heard the whip, and never felt the check upon my free speech and action until four years ago, when Mr. Webster, by his personal influence, brought the Fugitive Slave law 2 on this country. I say Mr. Webster -though the bill was not his, yet it is notorious that he was the life and soul of it. He gave it all the aid he could, and it cost him his life at last 3 ; and under the shadow of his great name all inferior men sheltered themselves. I say inferior men -they are of all sorts; accomplished men, men of eloquent speech -from the President of the United States down to all men without self-respect and without character; and it was strange to see age, and refinement, and wealth, and talent, and even repute for honesty, count for nothing with them. They had no memory for what they had been saying, like the Lord's Prayer 4 , all their life. They only looked for what he did; and if he stood on his head, they did. In ordinary, the supposed sense of their District or State is their practical guide in this country, and it keeps men inclined to liberty and justice; but it is always a little difficult to decipher what this sense is; and when a great man comes, it is so much easier to follow him as an exponent of this supposed sense. Besides, he is responsible, and they will not be. It will always suffice to say, "I will follow him." Gentleman, I say, then, plainly, that the great show their legitimate power in nothing more than their power to misguide us. That great man, deservedly esteemed and admired for his powers, and their general right direction, was able, through the fault of the total want of stamina in the public, to carry all men with him, to carry parties with him. That crisis showed much. It ended a great deal of nonsense we had been accustomed to hear and repeated on the 22d of February, the 19 th of April, the 17 th of June and the 4 th of July 5 . It showed what reputations are made of, what straws we dignify by office and title, and how competent they are to give counsel and help in the day of trial. It showed the shallowness of leaders, showed the divergence of parties from their alleged ground, and that men would not stick to what they had said, and that resolutions of public bodies, and resolutions never so often 6 put upon record by public men, will not bind. The fact comes plainly out that men are not so bound to the right, but by proclivity of constitution, blood and temperament, on that side. Now, gentlemen, in what I have to say of that eminent man, be very sure I do not confound him with
Emerson's Philosophy: A Process of Becoming through Personal and Public Tragedy
2019
ed poet or writer must face in a tangible fashion an evil which threatens to make smaller the life around him, and that writers and scholars indeed do have practical, longterm obligations as citizens.” Emerson’s speech went on to describe that Christian religion and the Constitutional values of Americans were incongruent with the current state of racial affairs. Emerson chastised a man he had formerly admired, Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, in his shift from slavery’s adversary to one who pushed for the law’s passage. Emerson wrote, “It is contravened by all the sentiments. How can a law be enforced that fines pity, and imprisons charity?” His own shift came not in turning his back on slaves as Webster did, but in moving from passive observation, as a peaceful founder of a major philosophical movement, to anger: “when justice is violated,” he wrote, “anger begins.” Finally, true to his defense of moral good, Emerson responded with fury as the issue of human bondage “turn[ed] ...
Relentless Unfolding: Emerson's Individual
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2003
Amid its romantic excesses such as "[t]o believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men,-that is genius" (Porte 2001, 121), Emersonian individualism remains a living project, one we would do well to understand more thoroughly and pursue more rigorously. To aid in this recovery, I will, in a translating repetition of Emerson's thought that engages a range of texts, offer eight theses that any successful reconstruction of individualism must embrace. 1 I am not claiming that these theses are unique to Emerson; others hold similar views. I have elected to work with Emerson, however, because his work eludes the exhausted opposition between atomistic and collectivist accounts of human flourishing. Emerson thinks in severely relational terms. I say "severely relational" because he both denies the possibility of an atomistic self and refuses to dissolve human beings into, or defer our endeavors to, the systemic activities of macrosubjectivities like culture, states, traditional communities, civil-social associations, ecosystems, or even a divinity. Because he broaches the issue of how individuals are private and public, solitary and engaged, Emerson strikes me as a salutary interlocutor for those who would rethink individualism. 1. Individualism Requires Conscious Self-Fashioning Permit me a point of stipulation and clarification. In metaphysics, we might speak of singular beings as individuals, and distinguish them from larger collectivities to which they may or may not belong. In this sense,
Emerson, Slavery, and Citizenship
Over the past quarter century political theorists have paid increasing attention to the political significance of Emerson's ideas. Yet both sympathetic and unsympathetic interpreters conclude that Emerson fails to articulate an ethics of liberal democratic citizenship worth the name. This essay argues that Emerson sponsors a robust ethics of liberal democratic citizenship. Why should well-off individuals sacrifice private goods for the cause of social justice? Emerson answers this question, though not in any single essay. The answer is spread over two decades of antislavery writings that reveal the complex interplay in Emerson's thought of two ideas: self-reliance and complicity. Self-reliance and complicity are inversely proportionate: the greater one's complicity, the lesser one's self- reliance. Emerson's recognition of this inverse relationship, and of the fact that the Union's political economy implicated him in slavery, spurred him to antislavery activism. Only through activism could he reduce the complicity that compromised his self-reliance. Emerson's antislavery writings and activism thus disclose self-reliance's politically dynamic implications: since the achievement of self-reliance requires the reduction of complicity, would-be self-reliant citizens have a strong incentive to help realize social justice.
Encountering the Viper: Edward Bliss Emerson and Slavery
The Qualitative Report, 2014
The journal of Edward Bliss Emerson often mentions topics that piqued his curiosity because they were unusual or puzzling. Few subjects were as foreign to him as slavery. Writing in 1831-32, Emerson provides us a series of aural and visual vignettes rather than a coherent commentary on slavery as a way of life. Focusing on the everyday aspects of the institution instead of the politics and economics behind it, Emerson nevertheless suggests the different lenses through which slavery was viewed by a New England intellectual and others.
INTRODUCTION: Emerson and the Law of Freedom
Society and Solitude, A New Study Edition, 2008
On the title page of Emerson’s Society and Solitude (with “society” receiving preeminence of place), the reader is informed that the book consists of “twelve chapters.” The distinctness of the chapters is emphasized in, and over, the unity of the book in the original 1870 edition. The customary running header for the book title goes missing, and instead the chapter titles appear at the top of both the righthand and the left-hand pages. Though there is certainly weaving of themes and figures of thought through the twelve essays, and the dual theme of the title essay appears repeatedly, overall thematic unity is not greatly emphasized. According to the Memoir written by his son, Edward, “through all his life,” Emerson weighed “the claims of the scholar’s two handmaids, Society and Solitude,” but “always favored the latter.” Accordingly, in the present book, Emerson resists the excesses of his own stronger inclination: the solitude of the scholar (and its unifying insight). Moral and intellectual failings connected with excesses of solitude are warned of on the opening pages in the story of the “humorist” who believed that the penalty of learning is to become as intolerant as an executioner who would kill the last man but one.
2020
Reflecting upon the fundamental role of public intellectuals in the nineteenth century, this dissertation focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle's epistolary friendship and examines their respective stances on slavery. More specifically, this study aims to think comparatively about how and why these intellectuals sought to present themselves as national representatives of American and British major philosophical movements and reflects upon the transatlantic dissentions of their times regarding the abolition of slavery. In fact, this dissertation looks at American abolitionism as a key element of a transnational dialogue between the "Old" and "New" world: while debunking the widespread assumption that Emerson and Carlyle were intellectual polar opposites, this study also analyzes the similarities of their philosophies. My argument falls into three parts: first, I demonstrate that both Emerson's and Carlyle's attitudes towards slavery were st...