[T]hat which a man is, does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property.

—Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

What a man does, that he has. What has he to do with hope or fear? In himself is his might. Let him regard no good as solid but that which is in his nature, and which must grow out of him as long as he exists. The goods of fortune may come and go like summer leaves; let him scatter them on every wind as the momentary signs of his infinite productiveness.

—Emerson, “Spiritual Laws”

“When will you mend Montaigne?” Emerson challenged himself in 1835: “Where are your Essays? Can you not express your one conviction that moral laws hold?”¹ Ironically, his philosophy, intended to affirm “moral laws,” has often been criticized as an amoral ethics of individualized activity. Emerson typically is accused of a “transcendentalist” fascination with the absolute that ignores or subsumes the tragic limitations of our material existence; curiously, this supposed absolutism has been described as taking two nearly contradictory forms. As the title of Stephen E. Whicher's influential study Freedom and Fate indicates,² critics have charted in Emerson's thought a shift from a naïve affirmation of individual power, in his early works, to a more sober focus, in his later works, on the forces that limit the autonomy and power of human acts. The “early” Emerson posited in this widely accepted narrative celebrates absolute power as a goal to which individuals should aspire—thereby blaming tragic inequities on individual failings instead of on social or political forces. The “late” Emerson, in contrast, celebrates the absolute forces that determine our human identities and acts—thereby linking individualism with a fatalistic acceptance of limitation and a renunciation of political action. Much recent criticism has set out to describe Emerson's amorality in historical, ideological terms, often arguing that his individualism endorses the amoral logic of laissez-faire capitalism and discourages collective political action. However, most assessments of his politics reinforce, even as they reformulate, the major contours of Whicher's reading. For example, Sacvan Bercovitch's argument that Emerson shifted from a “utopian” critique of capitalism to an “ideological” apology for capitalism updates Whicher's opposition of an early and a late Emerson. Myra Jehlen also emerges from Whicher's opposition, arguing that Emerson's assertion of absolute individual power paradoxically implies a negation of individual will.³

Emerson's ethics, I want to maintain, do not reflect these absolutist extremes of autonomy and determinism; rather, they extend his balanced, proto-pragmatic analysis of the power and limitation of individual acts.⁴ For Emerson, creative change is a process of limited transcendence—in which people turn inherited cultural tools to new uses, exceeding their previous reality only by facilitating the emergence of another, also limited, reality. Insisting that creative acts are constrained by both the cultural media with which they must be articulated and the environment they strive to reshape, Emerson views individuals as alienated from both the sources and the products of their acts. He therefore locates value in the act of doing: “The one thing in the world of value, is, the active soul,” he provocatively asserts in “The American Scholar” (CW, 1:56). Emerson's transcendentalism thus anticipates two fundamental attitudes of William James's pragmatism, namely, that ideas are limited human tools and that their “truth” lies in their ability to facilitate human acts.⁵ This emphasis on activity or work that lies at the heart of Emerson's ethics cannot easily be reconciled with traditional capitalist ideology, which locates value in accumulated (and alienated) wealth and profit. To reassert the pragmatic basis of Emerson's ethics is to gain a renewed understanding of the writer who inspired Thoreau in Walden and “Civil Disobedience” by articulating an “economy” of living measured in terms of creative experience and activity. However, in thus distinguishing Emerson's ethics from traditional capitalist ideology, it is crucial to address other recalcitrant ethical dilemmas posed by his thought, primarily the anti-communicative and anti-communitarian implications of his emphasis on action. Indeed, these dilemmas are hardly avoidable, for Emerson not only confronts them frankly but exploits them as central issues in such essays as “Self-Reliance” and “Experience.”

Emerson's pragmatic focus on action reflects his complex analysis of how culture both enables individual acts that may result in creative change and limits the degree to which any creative result expresses individuality. Invention—truly new perception or utility—occurs when the tools inherited from the past are used to transcend the horizon of perception and utility defined by those tools:

The useful arts are but reproductions or new combinations by the wit of man, of the same natural benefactors. He no longer waits for favoring gales, but by means of steam, he realizes the fable of Aeolus's bag, and carries the two and thirty winds in the boiler of his boat. To diminish friction, he paves the road with iron bars, and, mounting a coach with a ship-load of men, animals, and merchandise behind him, he darts through the country, from town to town, like an eagle or a swallow through the air.

(CW, 1:11-12)

This passage, from the “Commodity” chapter of Nature, describes all new creations as quotations of nature's forms and forces and of previous human works.⁶ Yet invention is not mere reproduction; it is a kind of metaphoric translation or turning that Emerson frequently calls troping:⁷ the railroad tropes a sailing ship by using iron rails to re-create the fluidity of water, carrying a “ship-load” on land. The steam engine retropes the sail, and both engine and sail retrope the fable of Aeolus's bag—the idea of catching and harnessing the wind.

However, though an individual's acts may facilitate invention, any true invention is by definition different from previous utility and perception, and thus beyond merely individual intention:⁸

I pursue my speculations with confidence & tho' I can discern no remoter conclusion I doubt not the train I commence extends farther than I see as the first artificer of glass did not know he was instructing men in astronomy & restoring sight to those from whom nature had taken it. There is no thought which is not seed as well as fruit. It spawns like fish.

(JMN, 2:387)

Invention here consists in making something the full use of which you cannot know, in disrupting or transcending utility. This nonintentional aspect of action, which Emerson often describes in such terms as “reception,” “whim,” and “abandonment,”⁹ can literally reinvent our reality: the “first artificer of glass” could not foresee how the telescope would change how we see the universe, nor could the inventor of the steam engine intend all the changes in the “realities” of space and time brought by the railroad.

Inherited culture is thus a collection of tools that enables individual creative acts and at the same time requires a surrender of individuality. Emerson expresses this duality in “Shakespeare; or, The Poet”: Culture provides tremendous power—“The world has brought him thus far on his way. … Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him.” However, this power also determines and constrains the direction of an individual's acts:

Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out of the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do for himself: his powers would be expended in the first preparations. Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

(CW, 4:110)

Similarly, culture is both a rich mine for invention and a medium that makes true invention extremely difficult. Creative acts depend on inherited tools; they escape the utility defined by those tools only to have any new result reappropriated as a new utility. Invention is a disruption of utility, an act of “abandonment” or “whim,” that occurs as a liminal moment between old and new utility. Emerson distinguishes invention from utility in “The Method of Nature”: “I look on trade and every mechanical craft as education also. But let me discriminate what is precious herein. There is in each of these works one act of invention, one intellectual step, or short series of steps taken; that act or step is the spiritual act: all the rest is mere repetition of the same a thousand times” (CW, 1:120-21). True invention here is strikingly restricted. It is only “one intellectual step,” an “act” within the “work.” The railroad, once repeated and used, is no longer invention but only “mere repetition” and “routine” (CW, 1:121). Extending this logic, even the first prototype model steam engine is not wholly invention; the “work” is not the same as the “spiritual act.” Returning to the “Aeolus's bag” passage, the act of invention might be no more than the mental act of troping, the thought of a new application that “realizes the fable.” Invention thus described is a kind of synonym for genius as Richard Poirier defines it in Emerson: a potential or energy for change that ceases to be itself as soon as it begins to take form in a medium.¹⁰

Two central, and related, facets of this theory of invention are crucial for understanding the aims and priorities of Emerson's ethics: first, his acute awareness that individuals are inescapably limited by the media with which and on which they must act, and second, his consequent portrayal of originality or creativity as extremely tenuous and elusive. These aspects of Emerson's pragmatism challenge the persistent idea that he naïvely affirms the sufficiency and power of individual action, thus ignoring its tragic limits. Indeed, his ethics are essentially a response to limitation: his pragmatic stress on individual action is an attempt to locate value that is not subject to alienation. However, though this emphasis on action distinguishes Emerson's pragmatism from the amorality of laissez-faire capitalism, it leads him into another type of amorality. By locating value in the individual's activity, Emerson problematizes the communication of value and, by extension, the fulfillment of communal responsibility. Similarly, his complex and conflicted attitudes toward political reform do not correspond neatly to laissez-faire capitalism but, rather, logically extend his pragmatic valorization of activity over established or codified cultural forms.

“HERE OR NOWHERE”: THE TRAGIC ETHICS OF ACTION IN THE MATERIAL WORLD

In town I also talked with Sampson Reed, of Swedenborg & the rest. “It is not so in your experience, but is so in the other world.”—“Other world?” I reply, “there is no other world; here or nowhere is the whole fact; all the Universe over, there is but one thing,—this old double, Creator-creature, mind-matter, right-wrong.”

—Emerson's journal, June-July 1842

Emerson's “transcendentalism” has often been equated with a desire to transcend the material world and its tragic limits. The charge that he lacks a sense of tragedy is a familiar one, running from Herman Melville through influential twentieth-century critics like F. O. Matthiessen, Stephen Whicher, and Myra Jehlen.¹¹ This indictment is typically based on the following assumptions: first, that Emerson defines nature as the perfect embodiment of an ideal truth existing beyond it; second, that he believes human action can potentially exert unbounded control over nature; and third, that his fascination with unlimited individual power at best leads him to disregard the material consequences of particular actions (valuing, instead, intuitive apprehensions of the “absolute”), and at worst leads him to insist that our failure to achieve total control over nature reflects our own vice. Jehlen offers a powerful reformulation of this traditional reading. She suggests that Emerson defines truth as wholly independent of human actions: we have access to truth only through our preexisting harmony with or intuition of nature; our actions merely express or replicate nature's absolute truth. This severe proscription of human creativity provides, according to Jehlen, a powerful metaphysical support for the amorality of capitalism: it simultaneously removes any responsibility for political action (since nature does not need human reforms or revolutions) and authorizes economic and nationalist expansion (since nature comprehends all such activity).¹²

Jehlen cogently traces possible ideological implications of the way Emerson traditionally has been read, but Emerson's ethics need to be reassessed, I think, on the basis of alternative readings. Ultimately, Emerson's pragmatic theory of invention cannot be made to fit conventional views of transcendentalism. His ruminations on Shakespeare and on the “first artificer of glass” demonstrate that Emersonian intuition or “reception” is not incompatible with creative action. Rather, intuition is only one aspect or phase of invention; it is the new perception that cannot be intended by the human actor but that depends upon his or her acts. Jehlen's contention that Emersonian action cannot create anything original is true only in the broadest possible terms: for example, that God created humans, their faculties, and the world, and thus created all potential human acts; or in secular terms, that people are part of nature, which thus comprehends all changes wrought by human arts. Emerson himself makes this latter argument in his 1844 essay “Nature.”¹³ But this does not mean, as Jehlen concludes, that Emerson defines human acts and truths as predetermined, confined to replicating an already absolute perfection. He insists that truth and reality are limited human constructs, products of culturally mediated perceptions of our environment and thus contingent upon human acts. Emerson's entire theory of invention stands on the premise that human action does matter, that people can and must re-create their reality: “[H]istory and the state of the world at any one time,” he asserts in “Circles,” is “directly dependent on the intellectual classification then existing in the minds of men. … A new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits.” However, as that essay insists, each limited reality is exceeded only by the emergence of yet another limited reality: “[E]ach thought[,] having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance,” begins to “solidify, and hem in the life” (CW, 2:184, 180-81). Thus Emerson approvingly notes one woman's definition of transcendentalism as “[a] little beyond” (JMN, 5:218; my emphasis).

In claiming that Emerson's universe is “infinitely benevolent,”¹⁴ Jehlen is insufficiently attentive to this crucial distinction of scope—that is, to the difference between, on the one hand, God or nature as the ground of possibility for all human action and, on the other, human reality as defined by particular acts. When Emerson insists that the universe is benevolent, that there is an immutable justice or balance in nature, he is describing a systemic balance that transcends any merely individual or even human measure of fairness or justice. When he affirms that the results of human action are moral, he is not asserting that the world is wholly answerable to human will and that failures and suffering thus reflect human vices. Instead, he is asserting that our limited ability to transform the world around us is an accurate reflection of our limited position in a nature that is not organized according to human concepts of justice.

This ethic of accepting the limited control human beings have over their environment is implicit in Emerson's theory of invention. Creative acts that transcend or disrupt our current horizon of utility can yield unintended new perceptions and utilities. Thus, in “Self-Reliance,” Emerson expresses his desire to “write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim,” in the hope it will be “somewhat better than whim at last.” But creative acts at best allow us to re-create our otherwise determining surroundings: “[P]erception is not whimsical, but fatal,” Emerson insists a few pages later (CW, 2:30, 38). Disruptive acts of “whim” can facilitate new perception, yet such perception is “fatal,” a term that for Emerson specifically refers to the external circumstances that determine us.¹⁵ Already implicit in Nature's claim that “[e]very spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world, a heaven” (CW, 1:44) is the corollary Emerson voices in “Fate”: “Every spirit makes its house; but afterwards the house confines the spirit” (W, 6:9).¹⁶ Even while our acts may change our environment, they then become part of a new environment or “circle,” a new context that re-acts upon us. As Kenneth Burke argues, tragedy expresses exactly this kind of relation between self and environment:

The act, in being an assertion, has called forth a counter-assertion in the elements that compose its context. And when the agent is enabled to see in terms of this counter-assertion, he has transcended the state that characterized him at the start. In this final state of tragic vision, intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are merged. That is, although purely circumstantial factors participate in his tragic destiny, these are not felt as exclusively external, or scenic; for they bring about a representative kind of accident, the kind of accident that belongs with the agent's particular kind of character.¹⁷

Instead of ignoring the tragedy of existence, Emerson's ethics express a tragic logic of human action in the material world. He is able to affirm the justice of nature only through a tragic transcendence of scope, through accepting nature's nonhuman balance. And he affirms the morality of human acts by accepting the imperfect results of those acts as accurate representations of people's circumscribed position in nature.

“Compensation” articulates the tragic ethics implicit in Emerson's theory of invention. And yet, along with the “Discipline” chapter of Nature, it is often interpreted to mean that Emerson affirms the benevolence of the universe by asserting that people deserve the suffering they receive.¹⁸ Consider Jehlen's discussion of “Discipline”:

I do not suggest that in writing Nature Emerson schemed to co-opt dissent. But effective defenses are seldom consciously invented, arising rather from conviction of more or less global rectitude. Emerson's assumption of his world's rectitude was absolutely global. So although he was not coldly calculating how to control opposition, he was thinking politically in this section, as seems clear from his making here the most directly political statement of the essay, the assertion that “Property and its filial systems of debt and credit,” along with space, time, climate, and the animals, are nature's benevolent guides to intellectual truths. … In “Discipline” Emerson brings up the two strongest objections to the notion of a transcendentally benevolent world: poverty and death. … [T]hese are the classical reasons for rebellion—one the oldest justification to rise against the human order, the other to rail at the divine.

The function of “Discipline” is to disarm these reasons. … After this section come “Idealism,” “Spirit,” and “Prospects,” in which Emerson can assert the possibility of transcendence—of freedom and omnipotence—because “Discipline” has co-opted the material reality of limits and powerlessness. The facts that some are indebted to others and that all owe the final debt of mortality have been made to testify to the primacy and infinite power of the individual in an infinitely benevolent universe.¹⁹

If “Compensation” is read as an extension of Emerson's theory of invention, this so-called “global rectitude” becomes more complex than Jehlen seems to allow. “Compensation” does not “co-opt … the material reality of limits” so as to “assert the possibility of transcendence” to a state in which the individual enjoys “infinite power”; instead, it opens by explicitly rejecting the notion of any justice beyond the material world. Emerson criticizes a sermon he has heard on the Last Judgment:

Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the preacher mean by saying that the good are miserable in the present life? Was it that houses and lands, offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are had by unprincipled men, whilst the saints are poor and despised; and that a compensation is to be made to these last hereafter, by giving them the like gratifications another day,—bank-stock and doubloons, venison and champagne? This must be the compensation intended; for, what else? Is it that they are to have leave to pray and praise? to love and serve men? Why, that they can do now. The legitimate inference the disciple would draw was,—‘We are to have such a good time as the sinners have now;’—or, to push it to its extreme import,—‘You sin now; we shall sin by and by; we would sin now, if we could; not being successful, we expect our revenge tomorrow.’

The “fallacy” of this sermon's logic, Emerson concludes, lies “in the immense concession that the bad are successful; that justice is not done now” (CW, 2:56). This is hardly an assertion that the material world perfectly rewards individual merit. Rather, in rejecting the notion of a transcendent justice, Emerson by extension rejects the notion that our material world should perfectly reward us, for the latter idea is implicit in the former: the very concept of a heavenly compensation implies the need to overcome the imperfections of worldly rewards and suffering. Emerson's satire on heaven suggests that banishing justice to an ideal realm does not transcend the moral limits of our world; it implicitly reproduces them. Far from desiring transcendence and infinite individual power, “Compensation” insists we must accept our material world and the tragic limits of our control over it.

Crucially, Emerson portrays this acceptance as a gain of meaning, not a loss. The denial of any transcendent truth invests the material world with all the meaning we shall ever have.²⁰ “Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral” (CW, 2:60). This “morality” expresses the full significance of all the facts and forces that determine our existence, not just those that fit our human concepts of merit and desert. As Emerson describes it in the journal account of his exchange with Sampson Reed, the “whole fact” of our world exceeds the terms of human morals—it is “right-wrong.” Whether just or not, the circumstances of our environment, both by responding to and resisting our control, reflect our limited position within nature. Thus an individual “comes at last to be faithfully represented by every view you take of his circumstances” (“Spiritual Laws,” in CW, 2:86). It is this very limitation that gives us our individuality: “We must have an antagonism in the tough world for all the variety of our spiritual faculties, or they will not be born” (“Man the Reformer,” in CW, 1:150). It is only against the resistance and limitation of material media that we know, express, and develop our creative power. The circumstances of the world that restrict, thwart, and eventually kill us are also what prompt Emerson's expressions of gratitude, notably in “Experience.” His ethics value limitations, presenting them as occasions for the circumscribed acts and performances that define us as humans, not “co-opting” them, as Jehlen contends, in an affirmation of total transcendence.

Having insisted that morality must be found in the material world, “Compensation” then affirms that this morality, though imperfect, is ensured by the way media both respond to and resist human acts: “The league between virtue and nature engages all things to assume a hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and substances of the world persecute and whip the traitor” (CW, 2:67). Emerson's theory of invention assumes our alienation from the tools and products of our own labor. For him, invention is a process of turning inherited tools to new uses not fully intended or controlled, a process in which each creative result in turn becomes part of a new if still confining environment. Thus true property, or inalienable value, exists only in the exercise and development of human faculties: “The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself. For the real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen” (CW, 2:66-67). It is important to note the limits of Emerson's claim. People, he allows, can be unjustly deprived of the material products of their labor, but the person who so deprives others achieves a merely material gain at the cost of a much higher good, the development and exercise of his or her own self: “[H]e has resisted his life, and fled from himself, and the retribution is so much death” (CW, 2:61-62). The alien and resistant status of material media, often viewed as the sign of the world's injustice, actually guarantees a certain degree of justice, for it ensures that the value of action must be earned and cannot be stolen. That Emerson clearly turns necessity into virtue only underscores the way in which “Compensation” is frequently misread. He does not affirm the perfect justice of material fortunes and thereby support the capitalist status quo. His definition of value, as the experience of action that cannot be stolen, explicitly discourages faith in capitalism's goal of accumulated property. “Compensation” warns that fulfillment should be sought neither in heaven nor in the material products of labor, but in activities that express human will and develop human talents.

“WORSE COTTON AND BETTER MEN”: REASSESSING EMERSONIAN INDIVIDUALISM

The common experience is, that the man fits himself as well as he can to the customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as a dog turns a spit. Then is he a part of the machine he moves; the man is lost. Until he can manage to communicate himself to others in his full stature and proportion, he does not yet find his vocation.

—Emerson, “Spiritual Laws”

Because capitalism and Marxism have been the two dominating social models from Emerson's time to our own, the task of assessing Emerson's ethics has often entailed deciding how his philosophy supports one camp against the other, eliding his difference from both.²¹ Emerson's ethics reflect his pragmatic analysis of how individual acts utilize cultural resources and facilitate cultural processes of change. The ethical implications of his analysis cannot easily be subsumed under either side of the capitalist/Marxist dichotomy of political economy: Both systems focus on the accumulation of wealth, capitalism maintaining that trade is a process of comparative advantage that enriches all, and Marxism that it is a process of class exploitation. In contrast, Emerson's acute sense of our fundamental alienation from the tools and products of action leads him to locate value in the experience of action and to measure value in terms of the quality of experience.

Like his near-contemporary Marx, Emerson is obsessed with the alienation of value.²² In the passage from “Spiritual Laws,” he warns of how easily “the man is lost” in the “machine” of culture, work, and wealth; in “Self-Reliance,” he criticizes people for having “looked away from themselves and at things so long” (CW, 2:83, 49). But Emerson is primarily a writer, not an economist, and his economic ideas derive largely from his sense of the affinities between language, money, and material property as cultural media for creative action.²³ For him, alienation does not begin with any particular mode of economic production; it is fundamental to our cultural, linguistic intelligence, to the fact that we live our lives with and against words, tools, ideas, and values that we inherit.²⁴ Since Emerson focuses on how individual acts facilitate cultural processes of change, his pragmatism has unquestionable affinities to capitalist arguments about market efficiencies. But he pragmatically insists that the only true “property” people have in material media is in the experience of using them, which leads him to reject accumulated wealth as the standard for judging economic efficiencies. He supports such institutions as private property and the division of labor only to the extent that these allow people to exercise and develop their particular talents.

The ethical implications of Emersonian individualism follow directly from the central tenets of the pragmatic theory of invention announced in the opening paragraphs of Nature: namely, that the present must be created out of the materials inherited from the past, that any original action must utilize cultural media that are by definition un-original. Inherited concepts threaten not only to obstruct our imagination of new relations to the world but also to deprive us of the action that is our only inalienable property. As Emerson asserts in “History,” “Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself”: “What the former age has epitomized into a formula or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule. Somewhere, sometime, it will demand and find compensation for that loss by doing the work itself” (CW, 2:6-7). This explains why Emerson in “Self-Reliance” claims that “[s]ociety everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members” (CW, 2:29); culture is a threat because it provides such powerful benefits, because it offers to do so much for us. There is an ethical imperative to resist conventional ideas, values, and lifestyles, not because they have no enduring value (Emerson insists they do),²⁵ but because the utility and power they provide deprive us of the more valuable experience of forging our own active relation to the world.

Here it becomes evident that Emerson's pragmatism differs radically from both Marxism and capitalism. Consider the description from “Spiritual Laws,” where the man becomes “a part of the machine he moves.” Emerson and Marx share a concern with the dehumanizing effects of the alienation of value. Marx stresses how private property and commodity exchange transform relations between people into market relations between products, and how wage laborers become mere parts of a production “machine” designed to accumulate capital for someone else.²⁶ To prevent this alienation of value, Marx endorses a revolution in the ownership of the means of production.²⁷ In contrast, Emerson focuses not on the alienation of economic production and exchange but on the alienation inherent in all culture (beginning with language itself). Thus he is concerned less with the potential loss of wealth than with the loss of active self-development and expression. Far from desiring to secure alienable value, he argues that culture everywhere makes us too secure: he calls for a radical reform in the location of value, exhorting us to seek an active expression of self that can be achieved only by rejecting the security of accumulated value:

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprizes, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. … A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.

(“Self-Reliance,” in CW, 2:43)

This passage demonstrates how Emerson's support for a division of labor rejects a capitalist motive of accumulated wealth: he insists that value must not be alienated from self-expression and development, that instead of postponing life, we must live. This is a direct consequence of his assertion that self-expression lies in the way we use the material and cultural tools that never really belong to us. Providing a sociological model of Emerson's assertion in “Self-Reliance” that “[p]ower ceases in the instant of repose” but “resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state” (CW, 2:40), his “sturdy lad” exemplifies success not as accumulated wealth but as succession, as the expression of self achieved in exploring different activities “in turn” over “successive years.” Emerson insists that the cultural resources for specialized activity must be turned to noncapitalist ends.

Emerson's statements on the economic issues of his day consistently express this pragmatic logic, complicating attempts to define him against the ideological poles of capitalism and Marxism. Consider the issue of division of labor. In Capital, Marx insists that any division of labor is a social division that establishes social relations and creates a social product. Under a system of private property, such social interdependence is expressed only in the alienated form of commodity exchange, which obscures the social basis of value. Market value is viewed as inherent in the product itself, not as an expression of the social labor costs of different products. Socially created value is falsely attributed to the individual producer, and social obligation is limited to payment of this false standard of individual desert.²⁸ In the 1844 lecture “New England Reformers,” Emerson expresses a surprisingly similar view, while also indicating his radical difference from Marxist political economy:

Who gave me the money with which I bought my coat? Why should professional labor and that of the counting-house be paid so disproportionately to the labor of the porter, and woodsawyer? This whole business of Trade gives me to pause and think, as it constitutes false relations between men; inasmuch as I am prone to count myself relieved of any responsibility to behave well and nobly to that person whom I pay with money, whereas if I had not that commodity, I should be put on my good behavior in all companies, and man would be a benefactor to man, as being himself his only certificate that he had a right to those aids and services which each asked of the other. Am I not too protected a person? is there not a wide disparity between the lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my poor sister? Am I not defrauded of my best culture in the loss of those gymnastics which manual labor and the emergencies of poverty constitute?

(CW, 3:151-52)

Recall that in “Compensation” Emerson fully acknowledges that the material products of wealth can be exploited; here he concedes that division of labor and commodity exchange facilitate such exploitation: “Why should professional labor … be paid so disproportionately to the labor of the porter, and woodsawyer?” Yet Emerson attacks this alienation by stressing the value of action, a value that cannot be stolen. Instead of emphasizing how cultural specialization leaves us vulnerable to being exploited by others, he argues that culture leaves us “too protected.” His main concern with the division of labor is that, if we defraud others, we defraud ourselves of our “best culture,” the activity and work that is our primary property in life. He attacks the capitalist logic of comparative advantage by articulating an economy, not of profits or wealth, but of life lived as action: if the division of labor merely serves to extract or exploit wealth from others, the supposed beneficiary has “resisted his life, and fled from himself, and the retribution is so much death” (“Compensation,” in CW, 2:61-62).

Yet Emerson celebrates individuals who can utilize cultural resources supplied by others, as indicated by his description in Nature of the “private poor man” and in “Shakespeare; or, The Poet” of the “greatest genius” as “the most indebted man” (CW, 4:109).²⁹ Indeed, he suggests that division of labor is inherent in the cultural constitution of human intelligence: no person can perform all the actions culture makes available; each must choose a specialized scope of activity. If a genius like Shakespeare did not utilize cultural resources and facilitate cultural tendencies, “his powers would be expended in the first preparations” (CW, 4:110). Similarly, in “Man the Reformer,” Emerson argues that “[i]f we suddenly plant our foot” in a principled “isolation from the advantages of civil society” that we “do not know to be innocent, … we shall stand still” (CW, 1:155). Thus he endorses a division of labor for its efficiency—because it facilitates creative individual acts by allowing each person to concentrate on particular areas of aptitude: the true “advantages which arise from the division of labor” are that “a man may select the fittest employment for his peculiar talent” (“Man the Reformer,” in CW, 1:149).

Though Emerson's focus on the problem of alienation differs from Marx's, he shares the conviction that any division of labor implies social relations and responsibilities; indeed, Emerson argues that the social interdependence inherent in culture makes all actions socially indebted. In focusing our energies, we must engage in some meaningful activity, “stand in primary relations with the work of the world” (“Man the Reformer,” in CW, 1:152): “No, it is not the part & merit of a man to make his stove with his own hands, or cook & bake his own dinner: Another can do it better & cheaper; but it is his essential virtue to carry out into action his own dearest ends, to dare to do what he believes and loves” (JMN, 9:189). By utilizing cultural resources provided by specialized labor, you can “multiply your presence,” but “in labor as in life there can be no cheating” (“Compensation,” in CW, 2:66). Ethically, a person may take advantage of cultural resources only if he or she uses this advantage to focus on meaningful work: “This were all very well if I were necessarily absent, being detained by work of my own, like theirs,—work of the same faculties” (“Man the Reformer,” in CW, 1:150). For Emerson, the choices of vocation that culture offers are essentially moral choices: the division of labor inherent in culture must not be used to exploit and live off others, but to enable each of us to work more vitally.

Believing that cultural specialization carries ethical responsibilities and that such specialization is inescapable, Emerson argues that individualized activity must and can be turned to moral purposes:

You may fulfil your round of duties by clearing yourself in the direct, or, in the reflex way. Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard, and absolve me to myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of duty to many offices that are called duties. But if I can discharge its debts, it enables me to dispense with the popular code. If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandments one day.

(“Self-Reliance,” in CW, 2:42)

This strident assertion of the morality of individual acts, even those that seem to disregard social obligations, reflects economic calculations of both efficient means and valuable ends. The sheer variety of social relatedness that makes every act socially indebted also, somewhat paradoxically, frees individuals to appropriate the resources of cultural specialization: it would be far too inefficient, if not impossible, to consider all the responsibilities incurred in the most basic human acts. Emerson makes this point humorously by running his list of household and civic duties to “cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog.” However, if it is impossible to measure all the moral responsibilities implied in the cultural sources of our acts, Emerson insists that we can and must measure the use to which those resources are put, the aim of our individual pursuits. His claim “I may … absolve me to myself” does not reject moral accountability but asserts that people must pay their social debt in this “direct” way.

Yet Emerson's defense of specialized labor on the grounds of its efficiency is secondary to his belief that diversified, individualized activity is a moral end in itself. When he claims “I may … absolve me to myself,” he is also endorsing a radical shift in our location of value: as in “Compensation,” he insists that we seek “salvation” neither in heaven nor in the alienable products of our labor but in the experience of action—experience that is radically subjective. While Emerson asserts that action must be moral, his definition of value as the active expression and development of self means that “moral” activity comprehends a potentially unlimited spectrum of human pursuits. His economics thus are based on a logic of maximizing vital experience: he asserts the value of people exercising different talents, enjoying different aspects of life, keeping different possibilities of experience alive. His writings are full of exhortations to expand human consciousness by exploring through our actions new relations to the world: “The American Scholar,” for example, declares, “So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess” (CW, 1:55); and “Self-Reliance” avers, “The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray” (CW, 2:28). Emerson asserts the morality of allowing people the freedom to pursue their own interests, even in extravagant, luxurious ways. “Man” is “by constitution expensive”: “He is born to be rich. He is thoroughly related” (“Wealth,” in W, 6:85, 88). This redefinition of morality is undeniably an “amoral” consequence of Emerson's pragmatism. Yet this “amorality” is itself a moral and economic calculation—the decision that since life is never safe or secure, moral activity should mean not merely preserving life but living it: “I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle” (“Self-Reliance,” in CW, 2:31).

It is critical to see how this Emersonian “amorality” differs radically from the amoral logic of capitalism, in which the self-interested pursuit of profit facilitates market efficiencies that allegedly increase wealth for all. Emerson exhorts us to harness the efficiencies of culture so as to maximize creative opportunities, but he is willing to see a reform of capitalist institutions whenever these thwart our creative faculties: “I would not have the laborer sacrificed to the splendid result,—I would not have the laborer sacrificed to my convenience and pride, nor to that of a great class of such as me. Let there be worse cotton and better men” (“The Method of Nature,” in CW, 1:121).

“I SHALL KNOW YOU”: THE ANTI-COMMUNITARIAN COMMUNICATION OF SELF

The claim “I may … absolve me to myself” marks another ethical dilemma posed by Emerson's pragmatism. By locating value in the experience of action, he problematizes the communication of value and thus the concept of a communitarian standard of morality.³⁰ Inherited culture both threatens and enables the active expression of self that, for Emerson, is our primary property in life. “[C]onforming to usages that have become dead to you … scatters your force,” he writes in “Self-Reliance”: “[U]nder all these screens, I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are.” But in the next breath he claims, “[D]o your work, and I shall know you” (CW, 2:31-32). Since all human acts must be articulated in cultural media, this “work” that communicates a true “knowledge” of self to others can only be the new use to which we put inherited ideas. Any original self-expression requires retroping, disrupting, or rejecting conventional meanings and morality; hence “Self-Reliance” calls on us to “speak the rude truth,” preach the “doctrine of hatred,” and “write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim” (CW, 2:30).

It would seem, then, that the active expression of self that Emerson defines as our primary moral value and responsibility opposes any concept of community based on conventional communication, on the sharing of codified values. The opening paragraph of “Self-Reliance,” for example, describes expression in strange terms of assertion and domination. Emerson begins by sounding a confident, and often-quoted, definition of genius: “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.” Despite this image of accord, it soon appears that truth, for Emerson, is less a knowledge to be shared than an occasion for action that cannot be shared. “Speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense,” he exhorts, implying that one cannot really have a conviction until it is spoken, that an inward belief is merely “latent” until realized in action. To have another person give voice to and confirm “precisely what we have thought and felt all the time” does not create an encouraging solidarity of conviction; rather, it deprives us of the act of speaking that latent conviction, forcing us “to take with shame our own opinion from another” (CW, 2:27). Emerson thus arrives at the peculiar position that expressive acts are necessary, not to communicate with others, but to prevent them from communicating with you, since if they did they might deprive you of, or distract you from, your own expressive acts: “A preoccupied attention is the only answer to the importunate frivolity of other people” (“Experience,” in CW, 3:47); “church and old book mumble and ritualize to an unheeding, preöccupied and advancing mind” (“The Transcendentalist,” in CW, 1:215).

The self-expression that Emerson values most highly is limited to a performative presence: the “act” within the “work” that he describes in “The Method of Nature,” a shaping energy or tendency of mind. Thus he claims that the “real value” of great works of art “is as signs of power” (“Art,” in CW, 2:215). Original works need not dominate us or deprive us of our own action; instead, they can apprise us of our own capacity to re-create our relation to the world: “Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form … has yielded us a new thought. He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene” (“The Poet,” in CW, 3:19). But because the primary value of activity lies in the experience of the actor, that value can be “communicated” only if an action provokes others to emulative or antagonistic acts of their own:

There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice: for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature.

(“Self-Reliance,” in CW, 2:47)

This is perhaps the most optimistic image of communication and community compatible with Emerson's location of value in the experience of action. However, his tropes of conversation here also acknowledge limits: to respond in the same “pitch” of voice is not necessarily to share the same meanings or values, perhaps not even to have a common language. Rather, it is to emulate the spirit or energy of other people's creative acts by doing something decidedly “different from all these.”

This anti-communicative aspect of Emerson's pragmatism leads to an ethical conclusion that many readers find repugnant—an individualism that seems to scorn the needs and infirmities of others:

And we cannot say too little of our constitutional necessity of seeing things under private aspects, or saturated with our humors. And yet is the God the native of these bleak rocks. That need makes in morals the capital virtue of self-trust. We must hold hard to this poverty, however scandalous, and by more vigorous self-recoveries, after the sallies of action, possess our axis more firmly. The life of truth is cold, and so far mournful; but it is not the slave of tears, contritions, and perturbations. It does not attempt another's work, nor adopt another's facts. It is a main lesson of wisdom to know your own from another's. I have learned that I cannot dispose of other people's facts; but I possess such a key to my own, as persuades me against all their denials, that they also have a key to theirs. A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or finger, they will drown him. They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices. Charity would be wasted on this poor waiting on the symptoms. A wise and hardy physician will say, Come out of that, as the first condition of advice.

(“Experience,” in CW, 3:46-47)

Faced with a passage of such troubling (and troubled) eloquence, readers often are tempted to conflate Emerson's argument with a capitalist blame-the-victim ideology (the type often applied to welfare recipients), which presumes that individuals have opportunities not, in fact, provided by society. But Emerson's logic here is explicitly non-capitalist: he is again articulating a critical response to the alienation of value, an alienation on which capitalism depends.

Emerson in this passage honestly assesses the costs and benefits of his location of value in the experience of action; for if it allows him to focus on value that cannot be alienated, it also forces him to acknowledge that such value cannot be given to others. This is the central message of “Compensation”: true value cannot be stolen, but it also must be earned. Emerson insists, without apology, that each person must earn his or her own value in life, for he believes that “seeing things under private aspects” is a “constitutional necessity”: our alienation from all media is the basis of our self-conscious, symbol-making intelligence.³¹ He acknowledges that alienation and the radical subjectivity of value can be “mournful,” but he also attests that this “poverty” brings into play the mitigating “virtue of self-trust.” “Compensation” argues that accepting the limits of worldly action makes the universe “alive” with meaning; similarly, accepting our own lives and actions as the only value we will ever have encourages us to see our actions as sufficient. Even if Emerson seems to be scorning others, the underlying logic is one of empowerment. To insist that others must help themselves is also to insist that they can: “I have learned that I cannot dispose of other people's facts; but I possess such a key to my own, as persuades me against all their denials, that they also have a key to theirs.”

This statement provides another description of the limits and possibilities of Emersonian community: though we cannot directly communicate or share value, we can know that every person has his or her own life and work, different from ours, yet equally valuable. Thus, the anti-communicative implications of Emerson's philosophy imply a communitarian ethos of pluralism. Far from being scornful toward others, Emerson's individualism affirms that each person possesses the talents sufficient to lead a morally significant life. This is a positive moral consequence of Emerson's “amoral” defense of the full spectrum of specialized, individual activity. Emerson's thought encourages not simply a tolerance but a celebration of diversity.

THE “NECESSARY FOUNDATIONS” OF REFORM

I now want to address the issues of political action and reform and to consider the familiar charge, renewed most recently by Sacvan Bercovitch and Cornel West, that Emerson's individualism precludes collective political action.³² There is no question that the anti-communitarian aspects of his pragmatism imply a deep distrust of political institutions. However, I want to complicate the conclusion that this distrust makes his philosophy politically impotent. Emerson's critique of political institutions must be seen in the context of his pragmatic attitude toward culture: just as he locates value in activity and not in products, so he locates morality in behavior and not in codes, laws, or institutions. If this view extends to a utopian, anarchist critique of political institutions, it also translates into a practical political mandate to examine human behavior critically and reform it.

By rejecting an emphasis on accumulated wealth, Emerson's pragmatism offers an important alternative to both capitalist and Marxist attitudes toward culture. The mixture of practical and utopian strains in his views on political action reflects his pragmatic analysis of culture:

It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make a sally against evil by some single improvement, without supporting it by a total regeneration. Do not be so vain of your one objection. Do you think there is only one? Alas! my good friend, there is no part of society or of life better than any other part. All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike. Do you complain of our Marriage? Our marriage is no worse than our education, our diet, our trade, our social customs. Do you complain of the laws of Property? It is a pedantry to give such importance to them. Can we not play the game of life with these counters, as well as with those; in the institution of property, as well as out of it.

(“New England Reformers,” in CW, 3:154-55)

Somewhat paradoxically, this perspective portrays culture as simultaneously more and less alienated than Marxism does. Emerson laments not only the alienation of property or wealth but also the alienation of all cultural media. For Emerson, every word, statement, or idea is an alien and constricting tool: “Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison,” he claims in “The Poet” (CW, 3:19). Yet this assumption of a universal alienation leads Emerson to portray culture as more responsive to human action than does Marxism. By focusing on the alienation of wealth, Marxism develops its traditional view of culture as ideology, as a totalizing system of domination that serves to perpetuate existing inequalities of wealth. In contrast, Emerson implies it is pedantic to assume that culture could ever not be alienated, or to locate the alienation of culture in any particular institution. Assuming alienation as the norm, Emerson views culture not as a totalizing system of control but as a medium that allows for and requires performance: though we are alienated from all cultural media, they can be turned to our purposes. It is crucial to see that this perspective rejects not only a traditional Marxist view of culture as ideology but also the capitalist doctrine that the efficiencies of cultural specialization can transform the self-interested pursuit of profit into the moral result of increased wealth for all. Instead, Emerson stresses how culture both limits and enables our action: it neither guarantees morality nor prevents it. This duality is expressed in his question “Can we not play the game of life with these counters, as well as with those …?” Culture allows for moral action, but morality is achieved only through our acts, through the way we “play the game of life” with the cultural tools we inherit.

A related dualism lies at the core of Emerson's attitude toward politics, government, and reform. On the one hand, he insists that political change is desirable and inevitable; on the other, he shows an indifference to and even cynicism about the reform of legal codes and institutions. An understanding of this dualism again depends on seeing Emerson's ethics as an outgrowth of his theory of invention. In the opening lines of Nature, he articulates a central axiom of this theory: the inexorability of change. These famous lines, often read as a complaint against history, actually portray history as a process of inevitable and revitalizing change. Emerson does complain that he and his contemporaries “buil[d] the sepulchres of the fathers,” “grope among the dry bones of the past,” and “put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe”; however, he then asserts: “The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields” (CW, 1:7). Emerson's tropes insist that the burdensome obsolescence of inherited culture is inseparable from the vital process of change: the passage of time that kills the fathers brings us life today; the same sun that dries their bones and fades their wardrobes creates new flax for us to weave our own garments. We continually turn the cultural tools we inherit to new uses, thereby reinventing the present and rendering obsolete those same inherited systems of ideas.

Using language that echoes the beginning lines of Nature, Emerson in “Man the Reformer” describes political change as an inevitable result of this creative change wrought by human activity: “[T]he world not only fitted the former men, but fits us. … What is man born for but to be a Reformer, a Re-maker of what man has made” (CW, 1:156).³³ Political change is inevitable because people are constantly re-forming society by changing the quality and focus of their pursuits:

[T]he old statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no such roots and centres; but any particle may suddenly become the centre of the movement, and compel the system to gyrate round it, as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato, or Paul, does forever. But politics rest on necessary foundations, and cannot be treated with levity. Republics abound in young civilians, who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living, and employments of the population, that commerce, education, and religion, may be voted in or out; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people, if only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow, and not lead the character and progress of the citizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; and they only who build on Ideas, build for eternity; and that the form of government which prevails, is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum. We are superstitious, and esteem the statute somewhat: so much life as it has in the character of living men, is its force. The statute stands there to say, yesterday we agreed so and so, but how feel ye this article today? Our statute is a currency, which we stamp with our own portrait: it soon becomes unrecognizable, and in process of time will return to the mint. Nature is not democratic, nor limited-monarchical, but despotic, and will not be fooled or abated of any jot of her authority, by the pertest of her sons: and as fast as the public mind is opened to more intelligence, the code is seen to be brute and stammering. It speaks not articulately and must be made to. Meantime the education of the general mind never stops.

(“Politics,” in CW, 3:117-18)

This passage illustrates Emerson's dual attitude toward reform. On the one hand, political change is inevitable: laws, like coins, are “stamped” “with our own portrait”; they reflect “man” as defined by the system of human pursuits in the period from which they emerge. As human activity continually changes, along with the range of pursuits that shape “man” and society, laws grow obsolete; the coin grows “unrecognizable” and must “return to the mint.” However, the corollary of Emerson's belief that human activity guarantees political change is his assertion that it also imposes limits: real political change must be based in the behavior of a society's citizens. Thus, he combines an affirmation of the inevitability of reform with a skepticism toward it.

Crucially, Emerson's insistence that reform must accompany social and behavioral change does not translate into a renunciation of political action. The idea that individuals can facilitate and even impel broad forces of creative change obtains in the realm of politics as well as invention: persons who understand the tendencies of an era can articulate those tendencies and galvanize others behind new moral purposes. Indeed, a new idea can “revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits” (“Circles,” in CW, 2:184); poets utter ideas that “become the songs of the nations” (“The Poet,” in CW, 3:6), and each institution appears as “the lengthened shadow of one man” (“Self-Reliance,” in CW, 2:35). Again, however, this assertion that people can change society through the power of ideas carries a reverse assertion: in order to compel meaningful political change, ideas must effect a real change in people's habits. Thus, in the passage from “Politics,” the “old statesman,” the actor whose creative medium is government, “knows that society is fluid” and that a new idea may “compel the system to gyrate round it.” However, he also knows that “politics rest on necessary foundations”: policies must be based in the “modes of living, and employments of the population”; and thus reform must “follow, and not lead the character and progress of the citizen.”

This dualism at the center of Emerson's attitude toward politics undoubtedly has a utopian element. As the unabashedly utopian flight in the closing pages of “Politics” shows, Emerson's insistence that reforms be based in the behavior of citizens, if carried to its logical conclusion, results in anarchism. However, if his theory of reform admits of anarchist extensions, it also has practical political applications. He found only too much confirmation of his political theories in the central political event of his lifetime: the sectional struggle over slavery that came to a head for him in the Compromise of 1850.³⁴ In the willingness of Massachusetts legislators and judges to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law, he found embittering evidence that morality cannot be codified or legislated but must exist in the actions of citizens:

I wish that Webster & Everett & also the young political aspirants of Massachusetts should hear Wendell Phillips speak, were it only for the capital lesson in eloquence they might learn of him. This, namely, that the first & the second & the third part of the art is to keep your feet always firm on a fact. They talk about the Whig party. There is no such thing in nature. They talk about the Constitution. It is a scorned piece of paper. He feels after a fact & finds it in the money-making, in the commerce of New England, and in the devotion of the Slave states to their interest, which enforces them to the crimes which they avow or disavow, but do & will do.

(JMN, 9:136-37)

Cotten thread holds the union together, unites John C. Calhoun & Abbott Lawrence. Patriotism for holidays & summer evenings with music & rockets, but cotten thread is the union.

(JMN, 9:425)

The sectional crisis forced Emerson to apply his political theories to American democracy. The level of liberty in America could not be guaranteed by the rights asserted in the Constitution or by the form of government established there. Political freedom was determined by the actions of Americans—by the will of legislators and judges to preserve the liberty promised in the law, and by the will of citizens to pay the price of true reform. The crisis of 1850 showed that this political will did not exist in Massachusetts: the primary political reality was revealed as the “cotten thread” uniting the manufacturing and commercial economy of New England to Southern planters. Emerson was compelled to abandon the notion of combining a principled opposition to slavery with support for union with the slave states. The political reality of the union was complicity with slavery: “Here is a measure of pacification & union. What is its effect? that it has made one subject, one only subject for conversation, & painful thought, throughout the Union, Slavery. We eat it, we drink it, we breathe it, we trade, we study, we wear it” (JMN, 11:361).

It is the context of these attitudes toward political reform that the basis for and extent of Emerson's rejection of collective politics must be assessed. Emerson does not oppose collective interests or action per se; rather, he distrusts the institutional vehicles of collective will. This distrust stems from a central tenet of his thought, that inherited culture threatens to obstruct the creative change that is crucial to the vitality of our individual and social lives:

Parties are also founded on instincts, and have better guides to their own humble aims than the sagacity of their leaders. They have nothing perverse in their origin, but rudely mark some real and lasting relation. We might as wisely reprove the east wind, or the frost, as a political party, whose members, for the most part, could give no account of their position, but stand for the defence of those interests in which they find themselves. Our quarrel with them begins, when they quit this deep natural ground at the bidding of some leader, and, obeying personal considerations, throw themselves into the maintenance and defence of points, nowise belonging to their system. A party is perpetually corrupted by personality. Whilst we absolve the association from dishonesty, we cannot extend the same charity to their leaders. They reap the rewards of the docility and zeal of the masses which they direct. Ordinarily, our parties are parties of circumstance, and not of principle; as, the planting interest in conflict with the commercial; the party of capitalists, and that of operatives; parties which are identical in their moral character, and which can easily change ground with each other, in the support of many of their measures. Parties of principle, as, religious sects, or the party of free-trade, of universal suffrage, of abolition of slavery, of abolition of capital punishment, degenerate into personalities, or would inspire enthusiasm. The vice of our leading parties in this country (which may be cited as a fair specimen of the societies of opinion) is, that they do not plant themselves on the deep and necessary grounds to which they are respectively entitled, but lash themselves to fury in the carrying of some local and momentary measure, nowise useful to the commonwealth.

(“Politics,” in CW, 3:122)

It is crucial that Emerson affirms the concept of political association, not only for parties of “principle,” but even for those based on the frankly material grounds of “the defence of those interests in which [people] find themselves,” for such association reflects “some real and lasting relation.”³⁵ Indeed, somewhat surprisingly, he argues that collective interests form the valid basis for parties, and that the threat of political corruption comes from mere individualism or “personality.” Yet if Emerson asserts the fundamental legitimacy of collective interests, he fears that collective political institutions (like all cultural institutions) threaten to become distorting and stifling. Parties, he declares, are too susceptible to the ambitions and interests of their leaders; they become focused on goals that have more to do with the perpetuation of institutional power than with any thoughtful application of principle. Emerson's theory of invention asserts that vital change is maximized when individuals exercising their own particular talents utilize and facilitate cultural resources and processes. Thus, he finds the remedy for the monolithic and inflexible aims of political institutions in individualized activity.

This pragmatic critique of collective institutions undeniably problematizes political action. When Emerson attempts to imagine collective interests defined not through distorting institutional channels but by the vital interests of individual activity, his utopian formula betrays the impossibility of completely realizing this goal: “The union is only perfect, when all the uniters are isolated. … The union must be ideal in actual individualism” (“New England Reformers,” in CW, 3:157).³⁶ Yet, as I have suggested, the practical possibilities of his political philosophy do not reduce to its utopian limits. His critique of collective politics is only one aspect of his belief that morality cannot be guaranteed in forms or codes but exists only in practice—a belief that provides a practical mandate to transform our behavior.

IN CONCLUSION

Emerson's ethics reject the standard of accumulated wealth that defines the capitalist/Marxist axis of traditional economics, articulating instead an economics of maximizing vital, self-expressive activity. Seeing alienation as a problem common to all media of human action, Emerson endorses a radical reform in ethical standards, locating value in the experience of action, in the active expression and development of self. Since his pragmatism stresses the cultural sources of individual acts, he insists that all action carries a social responsibility that can be fulfilled by using those resources for a moral end. However, his redefinition of value also expands the definition of “moral” activity to include the full spectrum of possible creative activities. Though these ethics imply a rejection of communitarian standards of morality, they simultaneously imply a pluralist basis for community.

These priorities place Emerson's philosophy firmly within the broad tradition of “liberalism.” Of course, scholars take differing views on the value or limitations of Emerson's liberalism. One influential judgment, by Bercovitch, is that Emerson exemplifies how American “dissent” holds a fundamentally ambiguous status between subversion and co-optation. Liberal democracy socializes individuals, Bercovitch contends, “not by repressing radical energies but by redirecting them, in all their radical potential, into a constant conflict between self and society.” As a theory of this conflict, Bercovitch concludes, Emerson's individualism is “not … a form of co-optation [but] a form of utopia developed within the premises of liberal culture and therefore especially susceptible to co-optation by liberal strategies of socialization.” He claims that Emerson failed to challenge the premises of liberal culture because his inability to endorse the collective methods of socialism forced him to halt his early utopian critique at “the edge of class analysis.”³⁷ It is worth remembering, however, that in any form of consensual government dissent has a similar “ambiguity”: people must decide what degree and kind of freedom they demand in return for submitting to society's laws. Like any social or political theory, Emerson's ethics confront conflicts and trade-offs between the goals of individual freedom and social responsibility. I have tried to show why assessments of Emerson's ethics must address the pragmatic analyses and priorities behind his positions on these conflicts. An understanding of how his ethics differ from traditional political economy allows us to reconsider how “susceptible” his thought is to “co-optation” by capitalist ideology.

Notes

1. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman and Ralph H. Orth et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1960-82), 5:40; hereafter cited parenthetically as JMN, with volume and page number. In the interest of readability, deletions Emerson made in the process of writing have been ignored, and minor punctuation marks added by the JMN editors have been included. Other Emerson editions quoted in this essay, cited parenthetically by volume and page number, are as follows:

   CW The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson and Joseph Slater et al., 5 vols. to date (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1971-).

   W The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-4).

2. Stephen E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1953).

3. See Sacvan Bercovitch, “Emerson, Individualism, and the Ambiguities of Dissent,” South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (1990): 623-62. In an argument of impressive breadth, Bercovitch places Emerson in a transatlantic debate between “individualism” as an “ideological” apology for capitalism and “individuality” as a locus of “utopian” dissent. Bercovitch argues that because Emerson was unable to endorse the socialist experiments of the 1840s, he shifted increasingly to an ideological affirmation of capitalism. Also see Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), especially pages 82 and 84, where she discusses how her reading builds on Whicher's.

4. My interpretation extends the important revisionary work that has already been done on Emerson and pragmatism. See, in particular, Kenneth Burke, “I, Eye, Ay—Emerson's Early Essay ‘Nature’: Thoughts on the Machinery of Transcendence,” in Emerson's “Nature”—Origin, Growth, Meaning, ed. Merton M. Sealts Jr. and Alfred R. Ferguson, 2nd ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1979), 150-63, and “William James, Emerson, Whitman,” in Attitudes toward History (Los Altos, CA: Hermes, 1959), 3-33; Harold Bloom, “Emerson: The American Religion,” in Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), 145-78; Stanley Cavell, “Thinking of Emerson” and “An Emerson Mood,” chaps. 2 and 3 in The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition (San Francisco: North Point, 1981), 123-38, 141-60; and Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (New York: Random House, 1987), and A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966; Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1985), esp. 50-70, 90-91.

5. Ideas, James insists, “become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience” (“What Pragmatism Means,” in The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition, ed. John J. McDermott [New York: Random House, 1967; Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977], 382). This definition of truth leads James, like Emerson, to place a primary value on activity: “[A word] appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work” (380).

6. As Emerson writes in “Quotation and Originality,” “We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation” (W, 8:178-79).

7. See Poirier on this connection between troping and “turning” (Renewal of Literature, 13).

8. James observes that “concepts are abstracted from experiences already seen or given, and he who uses them to divine the new can never do so but in ready-made and ancient terms. Whatever actual novelty the future may contain … escapes conceptual treatment altogether” (“Percept and Concept—Some Corollaries,” in Writings of William James, 253).

9. See, for example, the following usages: “All I know is reception” (“Experience,” in CW, 3:48). “Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive” (“Shakspeare; or, The Poet,” in CW, 4:110). “I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation” (“Self-Reliance,” in CW, 2:30). “The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire, is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment” (“Circles,” in CW, 2:190).

10. Poirier characterizes Emersonian genius as an energy that becomes distorted as soon as it must take form in the medium of language (Renewal of Literature, 79-82).

11. Melville's marginal comments in his copy of Essays: Second Series accuse Emerson of blithely dismissing the existence of evil (The Portable Melville [New York: Viking, 1952], 600-601). F. O. Matthiessen set the direction for most subsequent twentieth-century criticism by arguing that Emerson rejected tragedy, while Hawthorne and especially Melville made it central to their art (American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941], esp. 634, 180-86, 337-51, 435-59, 467-84, and 500-514. The central theme of Whicher's study is that “[a]lthough Emerson refused to conceive of life as tragedy,” he nonetheless developed an increasing “recognition of the limits of mortal condition [that] meant a defeat of his first romance of self-union and greatness” (Freedom and Fate, 109). Matthiessen's distinction survives in different forms today. For example, Jehlen contends that Emerson believed in “a transcendentally benevolent world” (American Incarnation, 109), while she titles her chapter on Melville's Pierre “The Rebirth of Tragedy.” For an opposing view, one that is largely in accord with the reading I offer here, see Michael Lopez, “Transcendental Failure: ‘The Palace of Spiritual Power,’” in Emerson: Prospect and Retrospect, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), 121-53. Lopez argues that Emerson, far from lacking a sense of tragedy or evil, portrays “failure” as a central and indispensable fact of life, for it provides the necessary “antagonist” or resistance against which human will expresses itself.

12. See Jehlen, American Incarnation, esp. chap. 3, “Necessary and Sufficient Acts,” 76-122. Jehlen asserts that for Emerson, “willful intervention either to hasten the future's advent or, worse still, to redefine it, can only distort the perfect order that already exists implicitly, and thus delay its explicit realization. Not only are deeds and revolutions not needed, they are forbidden, doomed to failure and worse.” Yet this conviction paradoxically “frees the builders for pure activity”: “By believing that his acts enact the universal purpose, the Emersonian actor feels free, not only from the tax of ethical or political considerations, but free to invoke all the powers that be, to his and nature's end” (85, 84).

13. In “Nature,” Emerson undercuts the dichotomy of nature versus art: “We talk of deviations from natural life, as if artificial life were not also natural. … If we consider how much we are nature's, we need not be superstitious about towns, as if that terrific or benefit force did not find us there also, and fashion cities. Nature who made the mason, made the house” (CW, 3:106).

14. Jehlen, American Incarnation, 110.

15. “Whatever limits us we call Fate” (“Fate,” in W, 6:20).

16. Similarly, Nature's claim that every spirit builds its own heaven is best understood in light of Emerson's provocative axiom from “The Poet”: “Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison” (CW, 3:19).

17. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: George Braziller, 1945; Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1969), 38-39.

18. “Discipline” is an incipient version of the argument Emerson makes in “Compensation.” It is in “Discipline” that he first claims “[a]ll things are moral” (CW, 1:25), a claim repeated with much greater detail and clarity in “Compensation.” For a representative reading of the later work, see Whicher, who argues that “Compensation” posits a naïve or extreme model of “automatic moral compensation” which “is without question the most unacceptable of Emerson's truths,” for it confronts “two classic human problems—the relation of virtue to happiness, and the problem of evil, and seemingly proceeds to deny that they are problems” (Freedom and Fate, 36). Also see Michael Gilmore's contention that “‘Compensation’ reveals an Emerson already well on his way to becoming an apologist for commercial and industrial capitalism,” who perversely applies “economic categories” to “the operations of the Soul” (American Romanticism and the Marketplace [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985], 31, 30).

19. Jehlen, American Incarnation, 108-10.

20. My phrasing here echoes Wallace Stevens's poem “Sunday Morning”: “And shall the earth / Seem all of paradise that we shall know?” (The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens [1954; New York: Vintage, 1982], 68). This parallel reveals a major line of influence reaching back from Emerson to Stevens, in whose poems the loss of a belief in any God behind nature can make earthly reality explode with human significance.

21. Consider, for example, Bercovitch's view that Emerson's skepticism toward socialism led him to embrace capitalism, to renounce “utopian” social critique in favor of “ideological” apology. Also see Gilmore's American Romanticism and the Marketplace, 18-34. Gilmore argues that early works like “The Transcendentalist” and “Self-Reliance” contain strong criticisms of the marketplace's pervasive and constricting effects, while works like “Compensation” and “Wealth” signal Emerson's shift into the stance of an “apologist” for capitalism (31).

22. Emerson lived from 1803 to 1882, Marx from 1818 to 1883.

23. Much recent criticism has considered how the “economic” logics and metaphors in Emerson's philosophy relate to the realities and ideologies of America's capitalist economy. Perhaps the most influential work is Gilmore's American Romanticism and the Marketplace, which locates the familiar Whicherian pattern of “early” radicalism and “late” conservatism in Emerson's attitudes toward capitalism. Christopher Newfield (“Emerson's Corporate Individualism,” ALH 3 [1991]: 657-84) suggests that the affinities between Emersonian individualism and the corporation illustrate the “[b]enevolent despotism” of American democracy (657), which, Newfield argues, substitutes oligarchy and consumerism in place of any meaningful collective control. Howard Horwitz (“The Standard Oil Trust as Emersonian Hero,” Raritan 6 [spring 1987]: 97-119) also explores the connections between Emersonian self-transcendence and the corporate trust, but warns against conflating the possibilities of Emerson's philosophy with the actualities of American society. The establishment of the trusts as oligarchies, Horwitz reminds us, was a historical event, the result of a specific power struggle, and as such does not “disclose the implied and total political agenda of [Emerson's] thought”: “[N]or should we think that because the trust was formally a transcendentalist institution [Emerson's] ideal of selfhood can only serve monopolistic interests” (118). Also see Richard A. Grusin, “‘Put God in Your Debt’: Emerson's Economy of Expenditure,” PMLA 103 (1988): 35-44; and William Charvat, “American Romanticism and the Depression of 1837,” in The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870: The Papers of William Charvat, ed. Matthew Bruccoli (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1968; New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1992), 49-67.

24. For Kenneth Burke's explanation of this view (one that demonstrates the pragmatic roots of his own thought), see “Priority of the ‘Idea,’” in A Rhetoric of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1950; Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1969), 132-37.

25. Emerson asserts the value of inherited cultural conventions in “The Conservative”: “Reform converses with possibilities, perchance with impossibilities; but here is sacred fact. This also was true, or it could not be: it had life in it, or it could not have existed; it has life in it, or it could not continue. … This will stand until a better cast of the dice is made” (CW, 1:188).

26. “Division of labour within the workshop implies the undisputed authority of the capitalist over men, that are but parts of a mechanism that belongs to him” (Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling [New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1906], 391).

27. Marx envisions a society in which “the means of production” are owned “in common” and the “total product of [the] community” is acknowledged as a “social product,” with each individual's “share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption” “determined by his labour-time” (Capital, 90-91).

28. See Marx, Capital, 82-84, 83-87, 94-96. According to Marx, a “definite social relation between men … assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Capital, 83). He insists that the value of a product is a function of the amount of human labor required to produce it: “[I]n the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating exchange-relations between the products, the labour-time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of nature.” Thus the value of the product of any individual producer is a socially produced value—a function of the society's division of labor—and the fluctuations of market value should be viewed as reflecting the “quantitative proportions in which society requires” “all the different kinds of private labour” (Capital, 86). The most just way to distribute wealth is on the basis of the individual's share in the total labor-time of society (Capital, 90-91).

    The capitalist form of commodity exchange portrays this social value as the private property of the individual—as the private product of his or her labor: “It is, however, just this ultimate money form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers” (Capital, 87). Marx argues that this alienation of social value is further exacerbated by wage labor and capitalist production. Unlike an independent producer who owns the means of production and sells a commodity, a wage laborer owns only his or her own labor-power, and the capitalist who owns the means of production sells the commodity produced by the worker's labor (Capital, 389-91). In this capitalist mode of production, the value of a worker's labor is not measured by the market value of a commodity sold by that worker, but specifically by the ability to produce surplus labor (capital) for an employer: hence, “to be a productive labourer is … not a piece of luck, but a misfortune” (Capital, 558).

29. In the “Commodity” chapter of Nature, Emerson describes the “private poor man” as able, like Shakespeare, to utilize a wealth of cultural benefits (CW, 1:12).

30. Donald E. Pease's Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987) argues that Emerson, like other antebellum writers, did not (as is commonly assumed) envision freedom in the exclusively negative terms of rejecting social conventions and traditions, but sought visions of communal involvement consistent with the principles and ideals of “America.” George Kateb offers Emerson as a prime example of an American strain of “democratic individualism” that opposes only certain aspects of communitarian thought (The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture [Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992], esp. 222-29). Kateb contends that Emerson's brand of democratic individualism does not reject social relations; rather, it scrutinizes and reformulates those relations. Such scrutiny is consistent with a democratic notion of community, which stresses the explicitly conventional and consensual status of human bonds (226).

31. At the opening of this section on “subjectiveness,” several pages earlier, Emerson declares: “It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors” (CW, 3:43).

32. Bercovitch, for example, argues that Emerson rejects the collectivist methods of socialism, although he admires its reformist and utopian goals (“Emerson, Individualism, and the Ambiguities of Dissent,” esp. 641-52). And Cornel West, in The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1989), concludes that Emerson's commitment to the “moral transgression” of individual nonconformity, his mystical celebration of “individual intuition over against collective action,” and his fatalistic or “organic conception of history” doom him to the politically impotent position of a “petit bourgeois libertarian, with at times anarchist tendencies and limited yet genuine democratic sentiments” (17, 18, 34, 40).

33. Emerson's phrasing in “Man the Reformer” also recalls two other sentences from the first paragraph of Nature: “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” and “There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship” (CW, 1:7).

34. Emerson's political opposition to slavery grew over time, yet he never became a radical abolitionist. As West argues, Emerson's journals show that he was by no means free from racist prejudices against African Americans (American Evasion of Philosophy, 28-35). However, his journals also show that slavery always was deeply abhorrent to him (see, for example, JMN, 5:15, 2:57-58). Emerson opposed the Annexation of Texas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, both of which extended slavery into new regions beyond the boundaries set in the Compromise of 1820 (see Len Gougeon, Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform [Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1990], 20, 191). His support for the abolitionist movement strengthened throughout the 1840s; yet like many Northerners, he only slowly came to consider that citizens of free states might morally be required to take direct political action to abolish slavery where it already existed. The crisis over the Fugitive Slave Law forced Emerson to acknowledge how both commercial and Constitutional ties made the free states complicit with Southern slavery. In his first speech on that law, in 1851, he insisted that Northerners were morally obligated to break it, and further suggested that they follow the example of the British and buy the freedom of the slaves from Southern slaveholders (“The Fugitive Slave Law,” in W, 11:186-98, 208-10). Elsewhere, he argued that preserving the union was not worth participating in slavery (JMN, 11:348-49). In 1859-60, Emerson proclaimed insurrectionist John Brown a hero (see his two public speeches on Brown in W, 11:265-81), and he eventually came to see the war as an inevitable struggle between free and slave societies, a struggle whose goal had to be the complete abolition of slavery (JMN, 15:299-302). In 1862, he hailed the Emancipation Proclamation, which for the first time made emancipation the direct object of the war (see his speech on the proclamation in W, 11:313-26).

35. For example, Emerson's theory of invention led him to believe that all people are served by principles of both conservatism and reform—by acknowledging the value of existing conventions and the necessity of change. See the companion lectures “The Conservative” and “The Transcendentalist,” in CW, 1:184-216.

36. Bercovitch offers a detailed reading of this statement as it first appears in Emerson's journals (“Emerson, Individualism, and the Ambiguities of Dissent,” esp. 628-30).

37. Bercovitch, “Emerson, Individualism, and the Ambiguities of Dissent,” 655, 656, 650-51, 641. In contrast to Bercovitch, see Kateb's Inner Ocean, which presents Emerson as a theorist of rights-based individualism, a democratic philosophy that Kateb considers “the best way of honoring … the equal dignity of every individual” (1).