SOURCE: “Emerson, Disclosure, and the Experiencing Self,” in Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 29, No. 1, 1996, pp. 51-64.

[In the following essay, Petruzzi contends that the disclosive theory of truth allows for a more complete description of Emerson's rhetorical theory than either Enlightenment rhetoric or Romantic rhetoric.]

INTRODUCTION

Emerson was educated at Harvard at a time when composition and rhetorical theory were dominated by Hugh Blair's “commonsense” rhetoric. The nature of Emerson's rhetorical theory has most often been positioned somewhere between the two poles of Scottish “commonsense” and Romantic rhetorics. I will argue that the disclosive theory of truth presents a more complete and richer way to describe Emerson's rhetorical theory than either the Enlightenment rhetoric of “commonsense” or the Romantic rhetoric of “self-expression.” For Emerson, the experiencing-self functions to organize discourse and construct reality through the continual effort to deconstruct the discourse of public interpretations, what Heidegger calls the “they-self.” As the discourse of public interpretations is deconstructed, there is a concomitant action to reconstruct a more authentic, yet always partial and temporary “experiencing-self.” The experiencing-self lives “in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is temporary; a round and final success nowhere” (1940, “Nature,” 417). For Emerson, like Heidegger, the nature of truth is “thrown projection”; that is, the experiencing-self discloses both the truth and the untruth.

Glen M. Johnson (1993) argues that Emerson's romanticism was mitigated by the qualities of style that Blair's “commonsense” rhetoric emphasizes: perspicuity, or clarity and economy, as well as ornamentation, or diction and eloquence. Johnson examines the way Emerson revised his manuscripts; he finds that Emerson's writing was neither spontaneous nor automatic. Rather, Emerson's written texts were crafted not only by “selection and arrangement,” but also by a “final stage of revision” that was “strictly rhetorical, designed to serve the communication of meaning” (171; emphasis in original). Johnson's main point is that Emerson's essays are not “inspired overflow,” but rather “the product of exhaustive revision” and “painstaking work” (189). Emerson “often depersonalize[s] or generalize[s] his experience,” but equally often he “individualize[s]” and “personalize[s]” his experience as he feels the need to increase the “rhetorical impact” (174). For Johnson, Emerson's writing is not spontaneous self-expression and his rhetoric is not essentially Romantic.

Sheldon W. Liebman (1969) argues that, although the “early” Emerson is a follower of Hugh Blair's “commonsense” school of rhetoric, beginning in 1821 “Emerson's ideas underwent a radical change” (178) because of the influence of “the romantic school.” For Liebman, Emerson's “latter” rhetoric is essentially Romantic and it includes the following tenets: “man's principal endeavor is to express himself” (193); “common speech” is elevated to “a position of virtue” while “eloquent” or ornate style is seen as merely “bookish” language (194); automatic writing will break through the acculturated and conventional modes of thought and privileges spontaneity over “conscious deliberation” (196); spontaneity removes “planning and premeditation” (196) as the two major “hindrances to effective writing”; and by removing premeditation and deliberation from the writing process, the writer achieves a “will-lessness” that facilitates a “true” expression of the self.

We can see that Emerson's rhetoric is being defined by the Romantic notion that truth is the “self-expression” of a private and personal vision. According to James Berlin (1984), Emerson is not a Platonist: “Despite his admiration for Plato, Emerson's philosophical idealism is not Platonic. His position is indeed closer to such moderns as Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer” (46). Berlin's view is that Emerson is a Social Constructionist: “Reality is a human construction, joining the world of ideas to the material object in the act of creative perception” (46). Berlin aptly points out the relational nature of Emerson's view of truth: “Truth is a product of a relationship; its source is neither subject nor object, but is located at the point of intersection of the two”; the relation is defined for Emerson by “the interaction of the perceiver and that which is perceived” (47). Although Berlin notes both the relational quality of Emerson's view of truth and the important role truth plays in the social and public world, he also insists that “for Emerson the ground of reality is the ideal” (46). Consequently, Berlin argues that for Emerson “[t]ruth remains always and everywhere the same, but new metaphors must be continually generated in order to express it” (53).

Ultimately, I would suggest that none of these theories provide an accurate description of Emerson's rhetoric because they fail to take into consideration Emerson's disclosive notion of truth. Emerson is not a systematic thinker; his interest in Plato as a “representative man” revolves around his identification with Socrates, “that central figure” (1940, “Plato,” 487) who typifies the endless search for truth, and also with Plato's notion of philosophy as an unending process.

EMERSON ON PLATO AND THE DISCLOSIVE NATURE OF TRUTH

Although Emerson, like Plato, flirts with a correspondence theory of truth, the most pervasive and important aspect of his thought on the nature of truth is the process of disclosure, what Heidegger calls the process of revealment and concealment. Emerson sees Plato's writing as the work of an active intellect who demonstrates that knowledge is a correspondence: “Things correspond. There is a scale; and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide” (1940, 483). Although Emerson describes a type of correspondence theory, the important thing to note is that here correspondence does not imply a mode of static correctness between the absolute and the contingent. Emerson describes truth in terms of relationality; a human being “studies relations in all objects” because he is in the midst of the world: “He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man” (1940, “Nature,” 15-16). Understanding exists as a relation between Dasein and the world. For Emerson, the theory of correspondence does not imply that truth is a mode of correctness of representation; rather, it implies a field of relations. The fundamentally interpretative nature of understanding and the expansive or dynamic nature of truth is both revealed and concealed through the difference between understanding the part and projecting a whole: “On seeing the arc we complete the curve, and when the curtain is lifted from the diagram which it seemed to veil, we are vexed to find that no more was drawn than just that fragment of an arc which we first beheld” (1940, “Nominalist,” 435). As Emerson notes, the correspondence highlights the difference between the part and the whole; recognition of correspondence is a “guide” for understanding, not an absolute standard to be mirrored.

The kind of intellectual activity about which Emerson is speaking occurs from within a framework of rhetorical action: “The world shall be to us an open book,” says Emerson, and because every object in the world has a “hidden” life, like a book the world needs to be interpreted. The “hidden” or “unconscious truth” is made manifest “when interpreted and defined in an object” (1940, “Nature,” 20). Interpretation makes an object manifest; it uncovers the object's hidden aspects so that the object stands phenomenologically revealed. The uncovering or revealing of the object itself is the process of truth; the object then enters into or becomes “a part of the domain of knowledge” (20). Interpretation includes both the critical awareness of the forestructure of understanding—“Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern which he turns full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind” (1940, “Intellect,” 296)—and the projection of new possibilities and new definitions of the world:

This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base; the one, and the two. 1. Unity, or Identity; and 2. Variety. We unite all things by perceiving the law which pervades them; by perceiving the superficial differences and the profound resemblances. But every mental act—this very perception of identity or oneness, recognizes the difference of things. Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak or to think without embracing both.

(1940, “Plato,” 475)

As Berlin correctly notes, Emerson views the world as constructed by the intellect; “all things” are united through perception. Perception is a twofold movement recognizing interaction of resemblances and differences. The discursive process operates from the difference of things; for both speaking and thinking it necessarily embraces the “oneness and otherness” of identity and difference.

Emerson understands Plato's interest in the problem of the one and the many as being central to cognition: “The mind returns from the one to that which is not one, but other and many; from cause to effect; and affirms the necessary existence of variety, the self-existence of both, as each is involved in the other” (1940, “Plato,” 476). For Emerson, speculation or thinking is a movement toward or a search for unity while action in the world is a movement “backwards to diversity” (477). While the activity of Man Thinking “melts,” “reduces,” and “absorbs” the diversity of experience in a search for the One, the search for the One is never successful: “No sentence will hold the whole truth, and the only way in which we can be just, is by giving ourselves the lie. … All things are in contact; every atom has a sphere of repulsion; Things are and are not, at the same time … therefore I assert that every man is a partialist” (1940, “Nominalist,” 446). The search for understanding one human being can be attempted only by understanding the whole: “You must take the whole society to find the whole man” (1940, “American Scholar,” 46). For Emerson, the circular pattern of understanding revolves around the one and the many, identity and difference: “These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought; the one, the many” (1940, “Plato,” 477), and, because of the interpenetration of these two principles, understanding can never be complete. This is why Emerson argues that “thinking is a partial act” (1940, “American Scholar,” 54).

Emerson's self-conscious exposition of the fragmented nature of the self and concomitant fragmentary nature of discourse results in a qualification that affects all discursive claims or assertions. For Emerson, this qualification in discourse unsettles the nature of knowledge to the degree that it cannot be corrected, even through an attempt to create systematic knowledge. Although Plato recognizes this limitation, Emerson sees that the Platonists have not. The power of Plato's thought does not lie in a systematic construct that “explains” complete or self-evident truth: “[Plato] has not a system. The dearest defenders and disciples are at fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, and his theory is not complete or self-evident. One man thinks he means this, another that; he has said one thing in one place, and the reverse of it in another place … but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches” (1940, 491). Emerson sees the problem of understanding Plato as intimately involved with the problem of the interpretative acts of his “dearest defenders and disciples.” The real intention of Plato's thought has been obscured by the interpretative acts that have created Platonism. Rather than being led by Plato's example to think of the world as “a thing of shreds and patches,” Platonists look for systematic order; rather than attending to the process of the mind that Plato describes, Platonists actually conceal the way the texts of Plato operate; rather than participate in the disclosure of the truth, Platonists participate in the covering up of the truth in Plato's texts.

Emerson recognizes that Plato's “beautiful definitions of ideas, of time, of form, of figure, of the line, [are] sometimes hypothetically given” (1940, “Plato,” 494),¹ but from out of the method of hypothesis emerges meanings that are disclosive in nature: “Whatever [Plato] looks upon discloses a second sense, and ulterior senses” (494). Plato's texts actually embody the projective nature of understanding, and they lead to further interpretative acts that uncover new “ulterior senses” of meaning. Emerson chooses Plato as a “representative man,” not because he devised a logically irrefutable system, but rather because he represents a “great average man” whose dynamic nature reveals the disclosive approach to truth:

Plato's thinking does not stand on syllogism, or any masterpieces of the Socratic reasoning, or on any thesis, as for example the immortality of the soul. He is more than … the prophet of a peculiar message. He represents the privilege of the intellect, the power, namely, of carrying up every fact to successive platforms and so disclosing in every fact a germ of expansion. The expansions are in the essence of thought.

(493; emphasis added)

Plato's thinking stands on its power to reveal the world, and each new revelation contains possibilities that in turn disclose new expansions. Emerson recognizes that Plato's notion of truth is processual; his constant effort to overturn old truths and to create new truths is a series of interpretative “expansions” that carries “every fact to successive platforms.” For Emerson, the impulse to generalize or to be a “universalist” is what creates an individual point of view, but thinking entails the ability to resist generalizing in order to “shift the platform on which we stand” (1940, “Nominalist,” 447) so that the “million fresh particulars” (441) of experience can provide new expanded platforms for “all [that] is yet unsaid” (447).

THE NATURE OF THE EXPERIENCING-SELF

Emerson's essay “Experience” describes the partiality or fragmented nature of knowledge as a condition of human experience. The opening image of this essay creates a vivid image of what Heidegger calls Dasein's “throwness.” Understanding our relation to others, the fact that we are “thrown” into the middle of life, is what Heidegger calls “being-in-the-world.” For Emerson, the experience of being-in-the-world is the starting point of his essay “Experience”: “Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight” (1940, 342). We are always already in the midst of existence, and this means we are in the midst of “old belief,” which “gives us lethe to drink” (342). Emerson states the problem again in “Intellect”: “All that mass of mental and moral phenomena which we do not make objects of voluntary thought, come within the power of fortune; they constitute the circumstance of daily life” (293). Consequently, Dasein, who is “immersed” in the concerns of everyday life, “cannot see the problem of existence” (1940, “Intellect,” 293). For both Emerson and Heidegger, forgetfulness, lethargy, indolence, and sleepiness all threaten our perception of reality and our understanding of self and are the “problems” of existence.

For Emerson, cultural habits, customs, and old beliefs construct a system of illusions that must be deconstructed by thoughtful critical analysis. The analysis consists of conceptual expansions that utilize both “the understanding and the reason” to discover and explore the horizons of thought. Leonard Neufeldt (1971) describes how for Emerson, “Every opinion or knowledge is essentially a new creation, a new understanding or interpretation of the world” (258). The interpretative nature of understanding means two things to Emerson. First, conceptual expansions are an organic process of intellectual development. He uses two images to describe this process: Emerson's first image is exfoliation or unfolding, “All our progress [of the intellect] is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud” (1940, “Intellect,” 294); the second image is a constantly expanding circle that “bursts over the boundary on all sides and expands another orbit on the great deep” (1940, “Circles,” 281). Emerson's description of the thought process is remarkably close to Gadamer's description of the hermeneutic circle of understanding: “To expand in concentric circles the unity of the understood meaning” (1988, 68). The second aspect of the expansive nature of thought is, as Neufeldt states, that it “reorders what we know” (1971, 259). Because thinking constantly reorders knowledge, Emerson sees himself as “an endless seeker” (1940, “Circles,” 288); all thinking is experienced as a process that equally unifies and disrupts the life of the thinker.

Those who see Emerson's rhetoric as an expression of “literary self-reliance” reduce Emerson to a proponent of American individualism. However, a reading such as this fails to understand the ontological concerns of Emerson's thought. Imitation, drills of school education, rules and regulations all operate as existential structures that disguise or, in Heidegger's terms, cover up authentic Being. For Emerson, the fundamental relation of human beings (the being of beings or the Many) with Being (the One) is always of primary importance. Emerson recognizes that the covering up of this relationship is co-original with the revelation of truth. The dynamic of the authentic-self, the self that experiences the covering up as covering up, seeks to make manifest “the system of illusions” that “shuts us in a prison of glass which we cannot see” (1940, “Experience,” 346). The reason Emerson constantly emphasizes individual “voice” and “expression” is because he uses experience as the primordial rhetorical model. The expression of an individual's voice both asserts and highlights the difference between the covering up typified by the “they-self” and the discovering of the “authentic-self.” In other words, for Emerson, experience is not “self-expression” of some inner and private meaning; rather, what is expressed is the experience, is the being of a voice as it manifests itself in relation to the “prison of glass which we cannot see.”

For Emerson, Nature is a philosophical concept: “All that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE” (1940, “Nature,” 4; emphasis in original). For Emerson, the self is both plural, a dispersed “us,” and individual or separate from “all other men.” Nature, or all that is “not me,” in and of itself operates to disguise or “fool” the authentic-self: “Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates” (1940, “Experience,” 345). The human experience of Nature is evanescent and has a “lubricity” that lets it “slip through our fingers” (344). Yet, the harder we clutch at an experience of Nature, says Emerson, the more it dodges us and the more we reveal “the most unhandsome part of our condition” (345). The exact nature of our “unhandsome” condition is that, in the attempt to grasp, observe, and control the objects of the everyday world, through moods we deliver ourselves over to our own systems of illusion or dreams. While temperament, the “iron wire on which the beads [of emotion] are strung” (345), provides the structure for the “system of illusions,”

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. … We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem.

(345, emphasis added)

For Emerson, moods control the way that the self experiences and understands the everyday world. This means that all perception is colored by moods; moods are the “hues” that focus vision and also determine how we “animate” or bring the world into existence. For Emerson, an individual's state of mind can either “counterfeit” experience or it can disclose the authentic-self or being of the individual: “Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture” (1940, “Nature,” 15; emphasis added). For Emerson, the only way to describe the ontological state of a mind is to interpret the way that mind constructs the world, but the activity of reception and construction of the world through the intellect is always anterior to the expression of our experience of state-of-mind.

In “Thinking of Emerson” (1993), Stanley Cavell notes that Emerson clearly distinguishes between an analysis of the way sense experience reveals objects and an analysis of the way mood reveals the world. Cavell aptly notes the similarity between Heidegger's and Emerson's “effort[s] to formulate a kind of epistemology of moods” (191). Heidegger describes the way that mood or “state-of-mind” discloses or reveals a kind of “submission to the world”; and in that submission to the “throwness” of the world the authentic-self is fragmented and overtaken by the world: “Dasein constantly surrenders itself to the ‘world’ and lets the ‘world’ matter to it in such a way that somehow Dasein evades its very self” (1962, 178). According to Heidegger, Aristotle was the first to recognize that the function of rhetoric was to interpret these moods (178). It is in the second book of Aristotle's Rhetoric that Heidegger sees a systematic attempt to understand the public nature of discourse. The public is the way the “they” reveals itself. All discourse speaks both into and out of the moods or states of mind of “they.” It is only through an interpretation of state-of-mind that rhetoric can “understand the possibilities of moods in order to rouse them and guide them aright” (178).

Cavell states that he is “startled by the similarities” (1993, 194-95) between Heidegger and Emerson. It seems to me that Cavell is quite right; the connection between these two thinkers runs very deep. Emerson and Heidegger are deeply connected by the way they describe both the nature of experience itself and the important way that the experiencing-self is in a constant struggle to make visible the “prison of glass which we cannot see” (1940, “Experience,” 346). For Heidegger, Dasein is in a constant struggle to overcome its contextual constraints: “The Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic Self”. (1962, 167). Individual human beings are “Self” only in relation to the social world; the self is “dispersed into the they, and must first find itself” (167). In everyday life a human being operates within an internalized mode of understanding that determines how an individual interprets the world. These social and internalized constraints are the illusions of the “they-self.” For Dasein to “find itself,” it must deconstruct the illusions: the authentic-self discloses itself to itself by “clearing away [the] concealments and obscurities, as a breaking up of the disguises with which Dasein bars its own way” (167). By clearing away the “concealments and obscurities,” the authentic-self experiences a disclosure of truth.

DECOMPOSITION IS RECOMPOSITION

Emerson begins “Intellect” by stating that the intellect's function is to dissolve “the subtlest unnamed relations of nature” (1940, 292). He uses two terms, intellect receptive and intellect constructive, to describe the activity of the intellect and the explicitly interpretative nature of the “rhetoric of thought”:

The thought of genius is spontaneous; but the power of picture or expression, in the most enriched and flowing nature, implies a mixture of will, a certain control over the spontaneous states, without which no production is possible. It is a conversion of all nature into the rhetoric of thought, under the eye of judgement, with a strenuous exercise of choice.

(298; emphasis added)

The experiencing-self imposes, through the intellect receptive and intellect constructive, its will and control upon experience in order to transform or convert experience “into the rhetoric of thought.” In other words, the rhetoric of thought is the activity of the intellect as it makes interpretative choices that “construct” or compose the “unconscious states” that the receptive intellect opens upon. For Emerson, rhetorical expression implies both an opening to the world and a willful construction of interpretative choices. Interpretation implies both the critical awareness of the forestructure of understanding, and the projection of new possibilities and new definitions of the world; in other words, Emerson's theory of rhetoric is based on the disclosive theory of truth.

The first aspect, the “intellect receptive” opens the mind to its relationship to the ‘system of illusion’ it exists within; the second is “intellect constructive,” which constructs, produces, or composes the systems of relations; in other words, it names the world. The intellect receptive is “anterior to all action or construction” (1940, “Intellect,” 292). Emerson argues that contrary to “common” opinion, intellectual activity does not make “abstract truth” (292). Emerson attacks the notion of objective truth, or, in other words, the notion that truth is absolute and separate from the human intellect. When truth is abstracted from the human context it becomes objectified, impersonal, and embalmed. On the contrary, Emerson sees truth as an organic occurrence. Truth is inseparable from human being and lives in the same circular pattern as human beings: life and death, generation and degeneration, decomposition and recomposition, truth and not truth, are all processes of “unfolding, like a vegetable bud” (294).

In order to understand Emerson's conception of the intellect, we first need to see why the intellect receptive is an anterior structure of mind. The intellect receptive is the “common wealth” that is contained in “every man's mind”; the wealth consists of “images, words and facts,” which are “scrawled” or written “inscriptions” on the walls of the mind, in other words thoughts (1940, “Intellect,” 295). But these thoughts are anterior to intellectual reflection because reflection acts only to focus the mind on “purpose” or “intent.” Reflection gives thought direction and an openness or receptivity: “Our thinking is a pious reception. Our truth of thought is therefore vitiated as much by too violent direction given by our will, as by too great negligence. We do not determine what we will think. We only open our senses, clear away as we can all obstruction from the fact, and suffer the intellect to see. We have little control over our thoughts. We are prisoners of ideas” (294). Here again Emerson uses the image of a prison to describe the human condition. As the analysis of experience has shown, Dasein exists only in the midst of a series of relations. Intellectual activity always starts by opening to the fact that thinking is dominated, imprisoned, and obstructed by its historical context. We can note that two dangers here corrupt the truth: the first danger is a willful violence that takes place when one tries to determine what truth is before it has manifested itself, before we have piously received or observed its presence; and the second danger is negligence, that is, that the ideas “so fully engage us” that we make no “effort to make them our own” (294).

The intellect constructive can be defined as the effort to make ideas “our own.” When “the truth appears” to the intellect receptive, it needs to be acted upon. Every appearance or revealment of truth is projective in nature: “Every intellection is mainly prospective. … Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern which he turns full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind” (1940, 296; emphasis added). Reception of truth is not enough; it is the active projection of new possibilities that gives truth its processual nature. The intellect constructive is “the marriage of thought with nature”; it joins the “me” to the “not me.” On the one hand, the constructive aspect of mind is “the advent of truth into the world, a form of thought now for the first time bursting into the universe” (297). Yet, on the other hand, the intellect constructive also contributes to the creations of systems of illusion.

As we have noted before, disclosure of truth has a concomitant concealing aspect that Emerson sees as a transformation of truth to untruth: “Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten his attention on a single aspect of truth and apply himself to that alone for a long time, the truth becomes distorted and not itself but falsehood. … Every thought is a prison also” (emphasis added). Once again Emerson reminds us that human beings live in the “prison” of glass, which surrounds us with an unseen system that distorts truth into falsehood or error. Emerson is like Heidegger who argues in “On the Essence of Truth,” that Dasein exists simultaneously within truth and untruth. Heidegger argues that human beings do “not merely fall into error”; they always live in “untruth”: “Error is part of the inner structure of Da-sein, in which historical man is involved” (1949, 317).

Truth and untruth coexist for Emerson; each contributes in an active way to the revealing and concealing process, which is inherent in the circular pattern of understanding. For Emerson, the disclosive nature of truth is an organic process that exists as a natural phenomenon: “The new continents are built out of the ruins of an old planet; the new races fed out of the decomposition of the foregoing. New art destroys the old” (1940, “Circles,” 280). New truths are created as the illusions of past truths are destroyed: “Decomposition is recomposition … [they] are only signals of a new creation” (1940, “Plato,” 494). Yet, Emerson recognizes that a dominant aspect of human temperament is the constant desire for stability: “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them” (1940, “Circles,” 289). Once people become “settled,” a platform of normative standards is established to codify one's point of view. In other words, once truth is viewed as stable and abiding, truth is transformed into an “old” belief: “Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every general law only a particular fact of some more general law presently to disclose itself” (281). Truth discloses itself. Yet, when truth is abstracted it dies: “It is eviscerated of care” and then embalmed or transformed into an idol. Emerson proposes a necessary deconstruction of the idols of abstract truth, of the illusions of settled truths: “I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker” (288).

CONCLUSION

For Emerson, the experiencing-self is constituted in discursive action and is always “being towards” the disclosure of a future meaning. The “authentic-self” is constituted in discursive acts and is always “being towards” the disclosure of a future meaning. Self-understanding is projected toward the disclosure of possible meanings. The destruction of everyday understanding provides an interpretation that discloses a self as self-understanding; but any disclosure serves only to reconstruct another, equally temporary, version of “everyday understanding.” The disclosive process is the concomitant revealing and concealing of truth. The rhetor reveals meaning through discourse: the meaning of discourse hides or, in Heidegger's terms, is a withdrawing that occurs in the very effort of revealing or arriving at a truth.

Emerson does not conceive of the self as “separate” from truth; rather, he describes the way truths are discursively constructed and always partial. The discovery of truth is an event that occurs only within an experiencing-self; the experiencing-self does not exist outside of its struggle to interpret the world. However, this struggle is not one of “self-expression.” Rather, Emerson emphasizes separating the “authentic” voice of the experiencing-self from the dominant discourse of the writer's everyday world. Paradoxically, the separation is both futile and necessary. It is necessary in order to participate in the continual process of revealing truth. It is futile because the process revealing the truth contains the process of concealing the truth with “system of illusion.” Emerson recognizes that destroying the illusions of the dominant discourse can be only partially successful: “When each new speaker strikes a new light, emancipates us from the oppression of the last speaker to oppress us with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields us to another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men” (1940, “Circles,” 284). Truth is both oppression and emancipation; it is, in Heidegger's term, “thrown projection.” Because of this, rhetoric involves a radical awareness that the nature of truth is a process. As James DiCenso (1990) notes: “The strength of the approach to truth as disclosure is found in its capacity to bring to light these constitutive dimensions of disclosure while maintaining a basis in lived experience or being-in-the-world” (56). Emerson's disclosive notion of truth operates within the field of relations established by an authentic-self experiencing the world.

Note

1. Gadamer's interpretation of Plato recasts what is commonly called either the “Doctrine of Ideas” or the “Theory of Forms” into what he calls the “hypothesis of the eidos” (1980, 35). For Gadamer, Plato's eidos or Ideas are a hypothesis that unites the manifold aspects of existence within the process of dialogue and dialectic. Gadamer makes an important distinction between the modern “scientific” method of hypothesis and the Platonic method of hypothesizing the eidos.

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