SOURCE: “Vision's Imperative: ‘Self-Reliance’ and the Command to See Things As They Are,” in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 29, No. 4, Winter, 1990, pp. 555-70.

[In the following essay, Jacobson explores Emerson's early theories on self-reliance, explaining that for Emerson, self-reliance leads to an emancipation of the will, allowing for a clearer understanding of the universe.]

Emerson sets down the practical imperative of his early thought in the opening paragraph of “Self-Reliance” when he writes, “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense.”¹ He describes a hyperbolic conception of freedom, freedom conceived as the unmediated expression of personal conviction unconstrained by regulations or rules. However, Emerson does not merely embrace the premise of pure expressivity; he goes on to assert in these lines that free expression affirms, shall affirm, “the universal sense.” Here we find what is peculiar and what is characteristic about Emerson's idea of self-reliance: its claim that radical freedom shall issue of necessity in universal value, that the hyperbolically private shall issue in a universal sense. The peculiarity of this belief can be emphasized by comparing it to its most obvious precedent, Kant's Categorical Imperative. Emerson's statement in some respects repeats, and may even be intended to evoke, Kant's famous assertion that freedom is the basis of universal value. When placed side by side, the two formulations show their similarity: “Speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense” echoes Kant's command to “Act only on the maxim through which you can at the same time will it should become a universal law.”² Moreover, Kant recognized the essential oddness of his thought: “The thing is strange enough,” he writes in reference to the Categorical Imperative, “and has no parallel in the remainder of practical knowledge. For the a priori thought of the possibility of giving universal law, which is thus merely problematic, is unconditionally commanded as a law without borrowing anything from experience or from any external will.”³

Kant's moral thought rests on the intuition that pure freedom itself can be the transcendental condition of moral action.⁴ And in this respect Emerson follows him. It is well known, however, that Kant mitigates the peculiarity of the impulse toward the Categorical Imperative by asserting that the transformation of pure freedom to universal law occurs through the mediation of reason—freedom legislates universal laws by appeal to the forms of reason. If the faculty of freedom overlooks all particular practical maxims, for Kant it does not overlook the structure of rational thought itself. On the contrary, it works through the structure of reason, and only thereby does Kant believe it returns freedom to practical efficacy. Thus the practical imperative in Kant's thought is finally no more or less than the command to be rational. Emerson, on the other hand, resists this and all limitation. He maintains the uncanniness of his intuition by refusing to retreat from the hyperbole of radical freedom to any definitive mediating structure, any antecedent criterion of value. Self-reliance thus consists of a skeptical release of the will from antecedent conditions, including especially the conditions of rational thought. It grows from the form of thought that Emerson identifies in Nature as matutina cognitio, the morning thought of forward-directed will that ignores a backward glance to prior limits of action and finds its value in what Emerson calls onwardness. As this suggests, self-reliance consists in an unlimited will, a will that knows no formal conditions. Emerson's early thought is founded on a skeptical will that, as he writes in his 1837 journal, comes “armed and impassioned to parricide thus murderously inclined ever to traverse and kill the Divine Life.”⁵ Insofar as recent criticism has focused on Emerson's representation and justification of conditionless will, it has accurately reflected that the individual for Emerson consists of the health of the will, the state of being oriented toward onwardness itself.

However, the emancipation of will does not entail for Emerson an essentially critical posture in the world, nor does it define an attitude that initiates or stands for the negation of meaning and value. That self-reliance affirms the universal sense makes clear that, for Emerson at least, the skeptical release of the will does not institute a negative method. It goes without saying that the emancipation of will involves a destructive moment. But Emerson found in skepticism the possibility for a fundamental affirmation, and it is in this respect that his imperative reminds us of Kant, that it has its Kant-like moment. However much self-reliance contrasts with Kant's rational Categorical Imperative, Emerson nonetheless shares with Kant a faith in the efficacy of a unified transcendental will. It is not enough, then, to infer from the destructive elements of Emerson's thought, from his skepticism in general, that his theory merely overthrows meaning, or that it leads to a prolific indeterminacy, or least of all, that it leads to some sort of broad deconstructionist position.⁶ The challenge for readers of Emerson's early essays and lectures is rather to understand how his deep and far-reaching skepticism can be reconciled with an equally far-reaching affirmation: how skepticism can signify the infinite self.

I would urge that we can meet this challenge by recognizing that Emerson's skepticism does not function within the limits of the epistemological project that largely defines modern philosophical thought, and that it thus reflects less a strategy of rational thought than an attitude of will. For modern rationalism, skepticism is limited to either providing a tactical means to locate the sure grounds of knowledge, or, when this fails, to becoming the spearhead of a nihilistic assault on the forms of rational thought itself. In the latter case, the destructive moment in skepticism becomes the endpoint of thought, finding its destiny in the subversion of constructions of meaning. The history of modern philosophy consists in part of the portrayal of this destiny. But, as I have indicated, it does not represent the value skepticism holds for Emerson. If his writings refute modern philosophical positions, his skepticism nonetheless is not aimed principally at argumentation. Or put otherwise, it is not limited to a rationalist project. Aligning Emerson's position with radical epistemological skepticism thus runs a sizeable risk: that of inappropriately situating Emerson's thought in a context he would not recognize as his own. More importantly, it has the effect of de-emphasizing, even eliding, the “vast affirmative” at the core of his early thought, and replacing it with a negative thesis.

Emerson is rightly read in the context of religious thought, as a writer who recognized the power of human will to manifest the world, and thus gave to human will the revelatory power displaced by Christian ideology to the otherworldly will of God. Emersonian skepticism serves this humanist thesis insofar as he conceives of it as the attitude of will, the way of being in the world, that describes the central causality of human will, returning to it the capacity, not merely to act freely, but by doing so to bring the world to appearance, to speak the universal sense of the world. Emerson's purpose in “Self-Reliance,” and in all of his early lectures and essays, is to describe such infinite power of human will, and thereby to recognize the centrality of Man in the world, a centrality veiled behind myths of the omnipotence of God or nature.

My principal concern in this article is to demonstrate that self-reliance is linked to a phenomenological capacity, to the ability to see truly; and that only thereby can it speak the universal sense. I will do so first by showing that self-reliance and skepticism are closely related, that the freedom of the self-reliant individual is not isolated or unprecedented in Emerson's writings, but rather intersects with and can be articulated through the terms Emerson attributes to the skeptical attitude. The vigor and life—the transcendent virtue—of self-reliance can thus be seen to consist, not of mere randomness of will, but rather of the activity of living skeptically in the world. I will then go on to show that the skeptical attitude implies the phenomenological capacity to see truly by willing the transparency of the world. The imperative to self-reliance thereby shows itself to involve two discernible elements: the performances of emancipated will, and the consequent universal transparency of the world before a healthy will. In the first respect, self-reliance stands directly opposed to the essentially contemplative posture at the core of reflective thought, and as such, opposed to the project of epistemology, a fact that I will develop by following Stanley Cavell's reading of the essay.⁷ Cavell's essay on “Self-Reliance” well demonstrates the performative nature of Emerson's skepticism, and by extension of self-reliance, and thereby distances Emerson from the tradition of modern reflective philosophy. The universal sense, however, can be understood only insofar as we recognize the phenomenological power of performative will. Therefore, I will trace the conjunction of self-reliance and the skeptical attitude to the capacity to bring the world to presence. Doing so will provide an explanation of Emerson's early thought that accommodates both the command to radical freedom and the insistence that free utterance establishes the universal sense. Moreover, it will allow me to specify the ways in which Emerson remains faithful to Kant's transcendental project, and the ways in which he revises it.

2

The most engaging of Emerson's descriptions of self-reliance is found a short way into the essay, where he writes, “The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature” (CW ii: 29). Emerson raises through this description the image of an attitude of indifference that accords with an unconditioned will. He goes on to fill out the idea:

A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict.

(CW ii: 29)

As a description of self-reliance, this statement is dominated by the sense of a will emancipated from crippling responsibility and released to the indifference that characterizes the boy's attitude before he is “clapped into jail by his consciousness” (CW ii: 29). It undoubtedly reflects the unconditioned spontaneity most often associated with self-reliance. However, the statement is more interesting for the capacity of evaluation that it connects to the boy's attitude. Indifference is set out as a posture of immediate judgment, and moreover, the posture from which genuine verdicts derive. If the boy's attitude is one of irresponsibility, then the effect of his attitude is evaluation of the most authentic kind. The most remarkable aspect of this description, then, is the relation it establishes between a conditionless will and genuine or right evaluation.

When, a few sentences later, Emerson characterizes the boy's attitude as the posture of “neutrality,” he provides the means necessary to link the boy's healthy attitude to the meaning of skepticism that he elaborates over the course of his writings. Neutrality carries precisely the sense of the suspension of judgment that Emerson identifies in “Montaigne” as the principle of skepticism. The boy is neither a critic nor a believer, his back is turned on the conditions of criticism and belief, and he stands, like the skeptic, as an “innocent” observer in the midst of the world. We can hear an echo of the description of the boy in Emerson's later depiction of the skeptic: “I neither affirm nor deny,” Emerson's skeptic says, “I stand here to try the case. I am here to consider, skopein, to consider how it is.”⁸

In neither the instance of self-reliance nor of skepticism does neutrality indicate a broad indifference to value, the mere negation entailed by universal doubt. Rather, in each case it stands for a specific indifference to antecedent criteria of value, and thereby represents the capacity for giving genuine verdicts, a capacity enabled by the scope that indifference or neutrality implies. It is not at all correct then to see neutrality as incapacitating or merely playful whim; evaluations that issue from neutrality, from a position of “unaffected, unbiassed, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence,” are not inconsequential or frivolous. On the contrary, they “must always be formidable” (CW ii: 29). Emerson says he writes whim on the lintels of his door-post to protect his genius, not to disarm it. The boy and the skeptic alike are marked by the unprecedented capacity to observe, to “look out” from their corner of the world, and to give value to the world without blame or prejudice. Although the statement comes from “Montaigne,” Emerson could as well have written of the self-reliant individual that “Every thing that is excellent in mankind … he will see and judge” (W 4: 161).⁹

What interests me here, at least first of all, is the connection between self-reliance and skepticism, and the implication that skepticism runs through and is essential to all of Emerson's thought. Stanley Cavell has recognized the central place of the skeptical attitude in Emerson's thought, and has developed its role. There is good reason, then, to turn to his work on “Self-Reliance” in order to sharpen our understanding of the meaning of Emersonian skepticism.

Cavell develops his reading by juxtaposing Emerson's notion of self-reliance to Descartes' skeptical cogito in order to note in Emerson's writings a rejection of the contemplative model of reason that stands at the core of reflective philosophy, and then to replace it with a performative model of reason. He thereby situates Emerson's thought in an emerging tradition of theories of action that dismiss material and ideal bases of value and engender the value of the self and nature through an act of will. Cavell's interpretation of “Self-Reliance” is important because he shows that the skeptical subject is essentially performative.

Cavell argues that Descartes' theory is weakened by its failure to show the dependence of self-identity on individual performance, or to be more precise, on the issuance of a skeptical attitude in an evaluative stance in the world. Cavell brings this issue to a discussion of “Self-Reliance” by focusing on Emerson's description of the upright position as a willingness to dare to say “I think, I am,” taking this statement to be a direct allusion to Descartes' famous epistemological formulation, “I think, therefore, I am.” Unlike Descartes, Cavell argues, Emerson recognized the necessity of action for the description of the cogito. In Emerson's use of it, the fundamental axiom of modern epistemology, as well as the set of problems it initiates, gives way to issues of action. Thus, if Emerson quotes Descartes, he does not quote him exactly. Or at least in quoting him he affirms, as Descartes hadn't, the moral imperative in the epistemological assertion, and with it the necessity of performance for the acknowledgement of the value of the self.

However, Cavell's critique of Descartes (as well as his consequent defense of Emerson) involves more than the suggestion that the self-reliant individual is active. More importantly, he indicates that within a skeptical method like Emerson's true individuality, or as he would have it, self-acknowledgement, is possible only to the extent that a context of otherness is itself acknowledged. “Because,” he writes, “it turns out that to gain the assurance, as Descartes had put it, that I am not alone in the world has turned out to require that I allow myself to be known” (Cavell 293). Descartes failed to make this clear. His “use of [the “I”] arises exactly in a context in which there are no others to distinguish himself (so to speak) from. So the force of the pronoun is in apparent conflict with its sense” (Cavell 280). The challenge to skeptical thought as Cavell describes it is to provide the means of locating one's skepticism in a context of otherness, for only thereby is effective or postural self-identity enabled. The figure of the upright individual attracts him, not only because it indicates action but because it is precisely an effective posture, a figure that is defined in relation to the world, that has value as a posture in the context of the world. It implies for him the position of standing, or of standing for, something—and thus indicates conviction as a function of one's position in some context of action. The “imperative of human existence,” he writes, “[is] that it must prove or declare itself,” which means it must bear responsibility for itself in a community of others (Cavell 279). The crucial fact of self-reliance for Cavell is that by acting—by daring to act—we dispose ourselves in a context of otherness, and thereby can be acknowledged.

Cavell's discussion sets our reading of Emerson on the right track; it is useful for its explication of the problem of self-reliance in terms of skepticism, of performance and effective value; for his insistence that self-reliance describes an active individual and reveals the individual in relation to the world, as it is disposed in the world, and as it thereby bears responsibility for itself. By drawing a connection between a formal cogito and Emerson's idea of individuality, Cavell convincingly demonstrates that Emerson's skeptical approach is rooted in a performance that enables the recognition of the self in the world. He indicates that the individual is thus present as an instance of becoming, a transitional moment, or as he says, “a transience of being, a being of transience” (Cavell 284). However, my sense is that Cavell does not sufficiently emphasize the phenomenological core of the performative act, the fact that for Emerson the boy “looks on” the world and the skeptic “sees and judges.” For Emerson, there is a profound intimacy between skepticism and sight, which is to say, between performance and sight. Later I will suggest why I believe that Cavell's failure to emphasize this intimacy leads him to misconstrue Emerson's meaning in an important way, but first I want to point out that even the upright position, which Cavell treats as a figure of a postural and dispositional individual, in fact refers to the process of sight.

Emerson derived the figure of uprightness from Milton in the seventh book of Paradise Lost, where it refers to the attitude of man at his creation. But more importantly, he calls it up in this essay from his own earlier writings, which show that he clearly understood the human attitude as a way of seeing. In his 1835 journals Emerson wrote: “I ought to have no shame in publishing the records of one who aimed only at the upright position more anxious that the thing should be truly seen than careful what thing it was” (JMN V: 43). The statement indicates that to be in the upright posture means for Emerson to be in a condition or attitude of seeing truly, to be identified with and to find oneself as the process of sight.

Cavell's emphasis on performance is thus only half of the story of self-reliance. For to do in Emerson principally means to make visible; to speak is to lay out the appearance of nature. To be sure, the appearance of nature presents an effective context in which self and otherness are mutually disposed—indeed the relations between them are rendered transparent. But it is important to recognize that the essential individual in Emerson's early writings is not the self found in a dispositional relation to otherness; rather, the act of self-reliance consists of a fundamental trust in one's vision, and the authentic individual is recognized as the prolific capacity to bring nature to appearance. What Emerson has in mind in “Self-Reliance” is a phenomenological account of individuality for which the “Trustee,” the “aboriginal Self on which a universal reliance may be grounded” consists of such a phenomenological power (CW ii: 37). In the very paragraph of “Self-Reliance” that refers to the final trustee as Instinct or Spontaneity—i.e. unconditioned will—Emerson completes his thought by describing the “involuntary perceptions” to which “a perfect faith is due” (CW ii: 37). The final trustee of the individual is the phenomenological capacity of unconditioned will, the involuntary, inevitable, unmediated illumination of the world, and secondarily, our place in it.

If we wish to understand Emerson's “philosophy of the erect position,” we should then take a lively interest in what he means when he says “the thing should be truly seen.”¹⁰ It goes without saying that he does not mean seeing either what is objectively there or what is subjectively-represented as being there. That epistemological distinction is not relevant to Emerson. That a thing be truly seen means that it be recognized before the eye of an emancipated will, transparent for matutina cognitio. Here we see the importance that Emerson places in uprightness; it is a skeptical attitude and a phenomenological power—an attitude that consists in the power of vision. Uprightness is Emerson's principal figure for a specific manner of being in the world, i.e. as the human power to manifest the world. Self-reliance consists of a phenomenological way of being in the world. It consists of unconditioned will in the service of a phenomenological method. Insofar as uprightness is the proper figure of Emersonian individuality, it suggests that the self-reliant individual consists of a causal power to manifest the world anew, that it names an orientation of thought that is directed away from any predictable appearance, and enables the appearance of a plurality of natural effects. Uprightness converges for Emerson with the boy's attitude and means the capacity to see without shame, to observe innocent of prior conditions. The boy's “formidable” verdicts stem from thus seeing, willing, things as they are.

That Emerson believed in the possibility of skeptical sight to manifest the sheer and unmediated effects of the world is suggested as early as the end of Nature in his well-known assertion that “The ruin or blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things” (CW i: 43). The coincidence of the axis of vision and the axis of things, enabled by the forward orientation of matutina cognitio, describes unmediated vision of the world as a natural unfolding of the effects of emancipated will. This statement in Nature is an early indication of Emerson's turning away from a rationalist approach to the value of self and nature, an approach he believed necessarily intervened in the relation between seer and nature, rendering the latter through fixed categories of thought and alienating the former from the consequent static world. The figure of the coincidence of vision and nature graphically illustrates Emerson's conception of the immediacy of the relation between will and phusis. It also suggests the essentially pragmatic nature of Emerson's insight; pragmatic, that is, inasmuch as the figure of twin axes places emphasis on the integrity of natural effects, and indicates that the value of self and world, for Emerson, will be found in the visible effects of nature.¹¹ The central causality of human will knows itself and has value for Emerson in and through the world it manifests. Emerson thus calls on us to be in the world as the occasion of the pragmatic manifestation of the world. The “transparent eyeball,” described early in Nature, is an effective figure of the idea of pragmatic sight. It well describes the location of the value of self and world in the appearance and gathering of nature's effects. Moreover, it identifies the eye and individuality without asserting the epistemological subjectivity of the eye. Emerson makes clear that all categories that could define subjectivity and objectivity are lost in the sheer manifestation of nature, and the individual is taken to be no more than the occasion of nature's presence. The individual does not mediate or condition nature's appearance so much as it is, to use a Heideggerian term, the “clearing” in which nature appears.

The conception of individuality as sight does not indicate a static manifestation of nature, however, but the process of nature's coming to appearance; this is the core meaning of the figure of the coincidence of the axes of vision and things. Emerson best reflects the fluidity and transitional nature of sight in “Circles” by representing the imperative to overcome any single horizon of the eye. The horizon of the eye establishes the limit of the appearance of nature. The eye's horizon is then the first and the only circle; it demarcates the space within which natural effects appear. However, the constancy of any single horizon of the eye establishes a fixed economy of value according to which natural presence is determined and rendered static. More importantly, within the economy of any horizon the individual is diminished to functional self-identity. Emerson's Orphic poet in Nature speaks of such dwarfing of ourselves (CW i: 42). The economic disposition effected by the horizon of the eye fixes the self in opposition to nature, subverts the coincidence of vision and things, and introduces an artificial divide between self and nature. The sedimentation and repetition of a particular order, as revealed within the eye's view, acts to construct normative and theoretical values that effectively constitute one's lived experience. Emerson's embrace of a performative phenomenological capacity is the foundation for his attacks on conventions and more broadly on all circumstantial limits. He views the delimitation of sight to a particular horizon of the eye as the consequence of foreclosing the coincidence of vision and things, denying the performance of the individual or turning away from the forward orientation of a healthy will.

Time and again, in “Circles” and elsewhere, Emerson characterizes the phenomenological destruction and progressiveness essential to his thought. He insists in a litany of phrases and sentences that his central value is the manifestation of pure onwardness: “There are no fixtures to men,” “no Past at my back,” “Life is a series of surprises,” “The continual effort to raise himself above himself, to work a pitch above his last height, betrays itself in a man's relations,” and most characteristically, “We can never go so far back as to preclude a still higher vision” (CW ii: 182, 188, 189, 182, 183). Everything emerges within the eye's horizon, but equally, there is no limit to what we can see, and therefore to how we can find ourselves: “There is no outside, no enclosing wall, no circumference to us” (CW ii: 181). Here Emerson advocates a phenomenological attitude of evaluation that consists of the sheer activity of overcoming one's limits, of recognizing that “the only sin is limitation” (CW ii: 182). In order to stand upright as the focal point of nature's gathering and appearance, the individual must overcome its self-diminution within any circle and find a new generalization, a new horizon of sight. Emerson conceives no end to this process; it is not as though eventually the true horizon of the eye, and thus of nature and the individual, will be found. Rather, the true horizon is found each time a previous economy is overcome; the true horizon is the emergent horizon that reveals the individual as the clearing that enables the appearance of nature. Seeing beyond is thus to see truly, to be in the upright posture, to think, to dare. And the practical activity that enables right vision is the process of overcoming self- and natural determination.

If the upright position implies a phenomenological power, then it should be added that recognizing this fact is crucial to our understanding of the universal sense. This point can be emphasized by thinking again about Cavell's article, for the universal sense is explicable only on the terms of the phenomenological thesis, and I would suggest Cavell's reading falls short of explaining Emerson's early thought, and specifically “Self-Reliance,” on just this point. Insofar as uprightness speaks the transparent appearance of the world as the body of relations that fall in place around acts of will, it lays out the universal sense of the world; it represents the fundamental capacity that Emerson attributes to human will, the power to bring the world to appearance, to enclose nature within the horizon of the eye, and thereby to effect the universal sense. Although he rightly emphasizes the active, performative nature of the upright position, Cavell overlooks its phenomenological value, and is led, therefore, to locate the self-reliant individual in the world, rather than noting the causality of the individual for the world's appearance. Specifically, Cavell depicts the individual as situated in a larger field of value, stating that the individual dares to think and to act up against the terms of an overwhelming external power, the sort of power that Emerson would later speak of as fate. By so doing Cavell places truth, or at least the provisional terms of true value, outside the individual and beyond the efficacy of human will. The revolution that Emerson conceived of under the sign of self-reliance consists, however, of recognizing the universality of authentic human will, of the essential life above the “running sea of circumstance” (CW ii: 70). I do not want to overstate my differences with Cavell, for there can be little doubt that by emphasizing the performative nature of the Emersonian individual he has established important terms for considering self-reliance, directing attention toward the individual's way of being in the world, the quality of his existence. But there is nonetheless an important point to be made here: in a fundamental respect Cavell's interpretation skews Emerson's early thought, turns Emerson on his head. Because he ignores the phenomenological causality of the individual, Cavell disposes the individual in an essentially alien world. Having done so, he can only construe the universal sense in formal terms, casting Emerson's thought as more rhetorical than it is, and finally asserting that the command to speak one's latent conviction is a “proposed therapy,” no more than “a fantasy of finding your own voice” (Cavell 286, 288).

It is not adequate to Emerson's early thought, however, to give to human will a merely rhetorical power, the power to create formal transparency. Emerson's early insight is not partial or limited, but rather consists of a profound belief in the universal power of human being to will the world's appearance, a belief in the possibility of the coincidence of vision and things. It is essential to recognize the phenomenological core of uprightness, its intersection with the argument of “Circles,” because thereby we see that uprightness provides the foundation for the utterance of the universal sense, and that it figures forth the cause of the real, living appearance of nature. It is a well known fact that Emerson would soon enough reject his early faith in the centrality of human will, but if we are to understand the imperative of the early thought—and indeed, the significance of his later turn to fate—we must recognize the phenomenological power that Emerson attributes to human will.¹² When we do, it is clear that the imperative of Emerson's early thought is not simply to acknowledge ourselves—though doing so is certainly an aspect of Emerson's concern, and the phenomenological thematics of the figure of uprightness hardly obstruct the illumination of the relations of self and otherness. The imperative, however, is to recognize the individual as the sole principle and occasion of nature's appearance, and thus to disclose nature, to act in such a way as to bring nature from behind the concealments that are put in place by the imposition of prescriptive conditions on the will. Emerson's imperative to speak your latent conviction is thus a command to see the world as it is, to discover the world you have built and your place in it.

Emerson's principal concern in “Self-Reliance,” as in all of the early essays, is to describe the meaning and manner of unconcealing nature, of being with nature. He doesn't naively ignore that we make reasoned decisions about our role in society, that we operate through the terms of conventions and norms. But he denies that doing so is the meaning of self-reliance. On the contrary, it shows the ultimate dependence of identity—the account we give of ourselves—on antecedent evaluative structures, broadly, the structures of society that he says are in conspiracy against the individual. Emerson describes a performative individual that bespeaks his coincidence with nature and thereby his engagement of Being; not the subjective domination or construction of nature, but human activity that discloses the nearness of human and natural being under the causality of emancipated will. The authentic speech he has in mind is not bound by the customs of social language; it speaks the plurality of value opened by the individual, by the individual's immediate relation to the proliferation of nature. Such speech has very little to do with being responsible to society in the narrow sense of rational reckoning, a fact that Emerson's critics have often pointed out. Emerson struggled, however, to convince his readers that it has everything to do with being responsible to human being in the broad sense, in the sense of recognizing the quality of our being in the world. The latter sort of responsibility implies Emersonian transcendentalism, a capacity that eludes appropriation by conventional forms of thought, and thereby affords a direct relation to Being.

3

I began this article by suggesting that Emerson shared Kant's intuition of the basis of moral value in freedom but substantially altered the conception of transcendence attached to it, maintaining the immediate transformation of private will into the universal sense. It is now possible to articulate the difference in Emerson's notion of transcendence by using the terms of the central imagery of sight. Emerson understood transcendence as the clearing of the eye, the space opened up within the horizon of the eye. His then is a phenomenological transcendence, not a rational one. It is height, the upright posture, understood as the activity of rising above normative conventions—which for Emerson means all principled determinations of thought—and seeing truly. To see truly is to establish a phenomenological opening in which nature and the self appear, and moreover, in which they appear immediately as manifest value. Transcendence, the upright posture and height are all comprehensible as nothing but this phenomenological opening.

If so, then Emerson altered the meaning of transcendence mainly by indicating that it is a matter of action, not contemplation, by inverting the traditional priority of theory over practice and rendering universality finite. The imperative in Emerson's thought is to act, rather than to deliberate; specifically, to act in such a way as to establish the eye's opening, to clear the area of the eye's horizon, to manifest nature. “Self-Reliance” compels us to action that destroys the mediate forms of thought that conceal nature and diminish the individual. Action accordingly precedes and enables thought. The fundamental imperative standing behind “Self-Reliance” is not Kant's imperative on freedom to legislate rationally, an imperative that presupposes thought's priority over action, but the Emersonian command to act freely and thus give rise to thought as the presence of the world; i.e. to ignore the external language of grounds and principles and to “Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is” (CW ii: 40). The imperative of early Emersonian thought is to act out of innocence in order to think, to see, clearly. Emerson often spoke of his imperative as abandonment. In “Spiritual Laws,” for example, he noted that our public speaking “has not abandonment.” Here oratory only figures forth Emerson's larger claim about authenticity. “Somewhere,” he wrote, “not only every orator but every man should let out all the length of all the reins; should find or make a frank and hardy expression of what force and meaning is in him” (CW ii: 83). Emersonian transcendence, figured by the decisiveness of speech, manifests being by following no pre-given path and having no definite goal, and thereby enables the universal sense as the authentic effect of actions by which the individual brings the world to appearance. The teleological structure assumed by rationalism locates universality in a discursive final cause. Advocating the willful abandonment of rational teleology, Emerson effectively reconceives the meaning of universal causality, construing it not as a formal and alien law but as a quality of life, the recognition of one's causality in nature, one's coincidence with the directionality, the onward appearance of nature, and thus one's manifestation of the universal sense of nature.

Critics who understand self-reliance strictly in terms of the imperative to abandonment are in an important sense not mistaken. Genuine verdicts do reflect the utterance of an unconditioned will. From the perspective of rationalist conventions of thought they are evaluations made without aim, random shots in the dark. The boy's attitude gives value—achieves self- and natural determination—without purpose or goal, as scattered assertions whose only intent is “the shooting of the gulf … the darting to an aim,” and whose only end is illuminating the unknown transition, “advancing on Chaos and the Dark” (CW ii: 40, 28). However, Emersonian transcendence, although emancipated from formal reason and impelled by the activity of abandonment, nonetheless identifies unified individuality, not the dispersal and fragmentation of the will, and it does so because assertion situates a phenomenological clearing, and speech articulates the boundary of sight. Self-reliance is therefore not only a feeling of onwardness, an affect of the will's power and freedom, but the presence, the universal sense, of the world as the effect of the will's authenticity. The act of speech lays out the terms of a decision that gives presence to the world and defines the individual. Insofar as decision consists of the pure act of severing or cutting off one's vision, the unity of the individual emerges through the decisive act of speech. Choice implies no rational deliberation and presupposes no a priori structure of identity, but it results in the unity of phenomenological resolution: the individual understood as the gathering of the transparent relations of self and nature. It involves a fundamental trust in one's own vision; to decide—and thereby to identify oneself—means both to believe your private heart, your latent convictions, and to speak their appearance as the emergence of the world, as the ever-new definition of the individual given by the willed manifestation of the world.

Emerson's phenomenological transcendentalism thus converges with the meaning of individuality, it returns the individual in the nonchalance of the boy's attitude, an attitude of abandonment that as such signifies the appearance of the world, an attitude that passes genuine verdicts and speaks truly out of its innocent observation, an attitude of will that speaks the involuntary perception given to it. Thus, when Emerson asks in his journal “Who can define to me an individual? … armed and impassioned to parricide thus murderously inclined, ever to traverse and kill the Divine Life,” he has already his answer (JMN v: 336-37). The individual is defined when we recognize our power to decide to blend with nature's appearance, to speak the truth of nature, and to identify ourselves as the occasion of that true appearance. Out of his skepticism, out of the death of God, Emerson found the possibility of practical transcendence and individuality in the decision that thus heeds the “awful invitation … to blend with [the dawn's] aurora” (JMN v: 337).

Notes

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed., Alfred R. Ferguson, et al. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971) ii: 27; hereafter cited as CW, with volume and page number.

2. Immanuel Kant, The Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, ed., H. J. Paton (London: The Mayflower Press; Hutchinson University Library, 1947) 88.

3. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, ed., Lewis White Beck (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1949) 142.

4. Cf. “Instead of this vainly sought deduction of the moral principle something entirely different and unexpected appears: the moral principle itself serves as a principle of the deduction of an inscrutable faculty … the faculty of freedom” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, cited in Robert J. Benton, Kant's Second Critique and the Problem of Transcendental Arguments [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977]) 55.

5. Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed., William H. Gilman, et al. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1960) v: 337; hereafter cited as JMN, with volume and page number.

6. See, for example, Barbara Packer, “Uriel's Cloud: Emerson's Rhetoric,” Georgia Review 31: 322-42; Harold Bloom, “Emerson: The American Religion,” in Agon: Toward a Theory of Revision (New York: Oxford UP, 1982); Julie Ellison, “The Laws of Ice Cream: Emerson's Irony and ‘The Comic’” ESQ 30 (2): 73-82. My reading of Emerson corresponds in some respects to the work of each of these writers, and I do not support the sort of return to epistemological readings that David Van Leer puts forward in his recent book (Emerson's Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays [New York: Cambridge UP, 1986]). However, for Emerson the disruption of epistemological categories of thought yields an affirmative potential, rather than a negative, deconstructive or merely ironic value. I will urge in this article that a complete interpretation of Emerson's thought requires a recognition of the identity of will and sight and thus of a consequent affirmative phenomenology. By noting the phenomenological core of the early thought, we not only enrich our reading of “Self-Reliance,” but also provide the terms necessary to comprehend the changes that occur in Emerson's philosophical method during and after the 1840's.

7. Stanley Cavell, “Being Odd, Getting Even: Threats to Individuality,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought, ed., Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986); hereafter cited as Cavell, with page number.

8. Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed., Edward Emerson (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1903) iv: 156; hereafter cited as W, with volume and page number.

9. If the self-reliant boy and the skeptic share the capacity of innocent sight, they nonetheless mark quite different roles for that capacity in Emerson's thought. “Self-Reliance” is Emerson's most powerful humanist statement, which is to say he identifies sight and judgment as human capacities. By the time he writes “Montaigne” Emerson has revised his theory, turning to a method of philosophical anti-humanism. The principal effect this has on human nature is to render it representative, typical. Thus, whereas the boy's innocence reflects the universal sense of individual authenticity, the skeptic's is a delimited, representative capacity. It is nonetheless wrong to conclude that no continuity exists between skepticism and the self-reliant attitude. On the contrary, both are motivated by the central enduring fact of Emerson's thought: his meditation on skeptical sight.

10. The development of the “philosophy of the erect position” can be traced over a number of years (JMN iv: 333). It refers to Emerson's theory of judgment and reason, which consist of the phenomenological exposition of the relations initiated and engaged by an active will. The treatment of uprightness as sight receives its most detailed development in “Circles,” where uprightness and individuality are explicitly identified with the figure of the eye.

11. Peirce formulates the pragmatic maxim this way: “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object” (The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed., Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1931] 5: 402).

12. Emerson's later thought is philosophically anti-humanist. But, this point will continue to be overlooked until we give due weight to the universal phenomenological causality of human will in the early essays, and thus are able to recognize that the turn to fate is predicated on a rejection of the phenomenological power of human will.