The Emersonian Myth of Knowledge in the New World

From his position as acknowledged sage of the northern states, Emerson articulated a philosophy that offered a good deal of support, direct and hortatory as well as subtle and implicit, for the destruction of knowledge. The statements and insights about knowledge that are sprinkled liberally throughout his works comprise a new American knowledge-myth; they not only suggest to his countrymen and -women procedures for destroying certain kinds of knowledge and repudiating certain ways of knowing, but they legitimize the whole endeavor as well, sanctioning it in nearly sacred terms. His thought is not really consistent on the subjects of knowledge and perception, however (actually it is consistent on only a relatively few subjects), so his knowledge myths are multiple. Overall he seems paradoxical—a Platonist with a passion for the particular, an absolutist with a relativistic imagination; nonetheless he proposes some ideas with intriguing potential for writers with deeper and more self-aware minds.

Whatever the tendency of his thought in other areas, epistemologically Emerson is anticonservative. First of all, nationalistically his was the strongest voice, providing the climax of a radical movement for a nonimitative national literature.* "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe," he insists, and encourages a new-world breakaway. But nationalism is only one aspect of his conception that knowledge needs to be up-to-date, continually newly created: "Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this."**In "The American Scholar" he avows respect for the knowledge embodied in the books of past ages, and throughout his essays he draws freely and frequently on the wisdom of the past—on Plato and Pythagoras, Shakespeare and Swedenborg—but the dominant message of his myth of new knowledge is its newness.

In many of his formulations this rage for newness is part of an even more radical motif: an unwillingness to accept any sort of cultural mediation between the individual knower and the thing known. "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" (7) he asks in Nature, and in "The Poet" asserts that "every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison" (463) from which we need liberating. Language too is a prison: "The poets made all the words and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses.... The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry" (457). Thus Emerson, like a number of other writers of his day, claimed a special appreciation for vividly up-to-the-minute language:

The language of the street is always strong. What can describe the folly and emptiness of scolding like the word jawing? I feel too the force of the double negative, though clean contrary to our grammar rules. And I confess to some pleasure from the stinging rhetoric of a rattling oath in the mouth of truckmen and teamsters. How laconic and brisk it is by the side of a page of the North American Review. Cut these words and they would bleed.

Even rationality itself could be a prison, Emerson sometimes asserted. He maintains in "The Over-Soul" that the highest and deepest questions are not even posed by the understanding (393), and in "The Poet" he explains how the best use of the intellect is in the abandonment of its controlled rationality:

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him.... The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or 'with the flower of the mind'; not with the intellect, used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life. (459)

Striving for disengagement from tradition and from the ideas, language, and rationality that culture interposed, the knower, according to Emerson's new-world myth, needed to establish personal experience as the basis of knowing. Only through immersion in the immediacy, the multifariousness, the spontaneity of firsthand experience could a person hope to know the world in its essential otherness. Along this line of thought, Emerson seems to have felt that our traditional conceptually oriented perception was unable to get beyond conventions and stereotypes and into new insights; the flux of experiences, however, could evade or overwhelm our categories and surprise us with new revelation. "I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think," he says. "I observe that difference, and shall observe it. One day I shall know the value and law of this discrepance" (491–492). In that famous exhortation "The American Scholar," using himself as the implied model knower, he advocates the plunge into multifarious otherness in these terms:

The world,—this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an instinct, that so shall the dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its fear; I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion. (60)

I expect that the implicit metaphor of western expansion, of annexation and domination, is more than a rhetorical ploy here. In a very real sense (as we shall soon see) the act of knowing was for Emerson an act of imposing the self of the knower on the nature of the thing known. That notwithstanding, the pattern he advocates, of a knower overwhelming his conceptual categories in a flood of perceptual data, prevails, as in his famous "transparent eyeball" passage in Nature:

Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. (4–5)

Of course his advocacy of experiencing the new things and the commonplace things of the world is a key part of this program for expanding knowledge. And his appreciation of science is another aspect of this knowledge-myth, as exemplified by the beauty he can find in "the galvanic battery, the electric jar, the prism, the chemist's retort" (in, it is worth noting, his essay "Art") (440).

The act of knowing is an individual act—so runs this myth. Knowledge is genuine only when the individual knower comes to know it for himself, in his own specific way: "We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience, and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,—must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know" (240). The individual knower needs to pursue the act of knowing with all faculties and capacities—emotional and instinctual as well as rational; peculiar and personal as well as universal. "I need my fear and my superstition as much as my purity and courage, to construct the glossary which opens the Sanscrit [sic] of the world," he affirms to himself in his journal, and "trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason" he exhorts his readers in his essay "Intellect" (419). Emerson's ideas of perception and knowledge are based on a faith that the individual mind, liberated to follow its own particular impulses, will somehow shape to the contours of the outside world:

As the traveller who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible. (460)

There could hardly be a faith more destructive of conventional knowledge.

In its literary applications the Emersonian myth puts the highest premium on originality. It casts poets as "liberating gods" and asks for radically individualistic writing: "I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism." As examples of extraordinary writers he cites Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Kepler, and Swedenborg, and as liberating conceptual systems, he specifies magic, astrology, palmistry, and mesmerism—although he is writing an essay on the poet (462). (The presence of a physical scientist on this list is of interest, adumbrating, perhaps, the next century's view of scientific originality)

The extremest reaches of Emerson's philosophy of knowledge lie in a realm of radical relativism. Uncharacteristic of much of the rest of his thought and of nineteenth-century thought generally, they more resemble the uncertain terrain of the twentieth century. At times his universe seems indeterminate, and all approaches to knowledge arbitrary. "The highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact" (447), he states, giving a free reign to the possibility of variant perceptions; and at times he even proposes a view of nature as having no basic identity to which a true idea of things can correspond. "There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees" (401), he says; and again, "Nature ... resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of fresh particulars.... You are one thing, but nature is one thing and the other thing, in the same moment" (581).

But even the knower seems not "one thing" to him at times, further multiplying the ambiguity of knowledge: "Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,—these are the threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life. I dare not assume to give their order, but I name them as I find them in my way. I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me" (490–491). As would be the case with Ahab's doubloon, the meaning of anything is strictly relative to the individual, transient state of its beholders:

History and the state of the world at any one time [are] directly dependent on the intellectual classification then existing in the minds of men. The things which are dear to men at this hour are so on account of the ideas which have emerged on their mental horizon, and which cause the present order of things as a tree bears its apples. A new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits. (407–408)

For Emerson in these relativistic frames of mind it would seem that there is no possibility whatever of direct knowledge of reality, however strong his urgings toward pure or unmediated experience. The key that he offers to knowing in this intermediate universe is metaphor. Figurative seeing is the way to translate life into truth:

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols; workmen, work, and tools, words and things, birth and death, all are emblems; but we sympathize with the symbols, and, being infatuated with the economical uses of things, we do not know that they are thoughts. The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb and inanimate object. (456)

But no particular figurative insight has any finality, Emerson says; our truth changes over time. Humankind's process of truth-seeking thus consists of passing through a temporal succession of metaphoric approximations—each new metaphoric insight gets us closer to reality, but none will ever give us its precise picture. This the poet knows, claims Emerson, and the mystic does not:

the quality of imagination is to flow, and not to freeze.... Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. (463)

So much for the hypothesis of Emerson as radical epistemologist. I have selected ideas and quotations for this segment with a purpose of seeing how much like a post-Machian, post-Whiteheadian thinker Emerson could seem, trying to reveal those elements in his myth of new-world knowledge that could have encouraged his contemporaries onto paths that would lead to the epistemological realms of Wallace Stevens or William Faulkner. It would be a mistake, however, to identify Emerson as especially prescient of the science-steeped, post-phenomenalist thought of the twentieth century. It would be a mistake because, in the first place, he was relying on literary, theological, ethical, and aesthetic traditions of thought rather than investigative, scientific ones. To him science was facts generalized, names, paraphernalia, historic discoveries, or, in its highest levels, it was physical nature entirely transcended. It wasn't method, process, or specialized mental discipline. His concept of knowledge as developing out of a succession of metaphorical approximations is closer in origin to the rhetoric of Shakespearian and Metaphysical lyric poetry, of the standard nineteenth-century sermon, or of the King James Bible than it is to the scientists' pattern of formation, testing, and relegation of hypothesis. (Did he even know that the explanation of heat in terms of caloric had quite recently been supplanted by the theory of molecular motion? Was he aware that a momentous new theory of universal force conservation was proposed in the early 1840s? He certainly knew of Coleridge's theory of the imagination.) In the second place it would be a mistake to propose Emerson as a father of twentieth-century epistemology and knowledge destruction because most of the main tendencies of his thought are in a different and entirely uncongenial direction.

For one thing Emerson was an irrepressibly didactic writer, and his didacticism assumed a teleological, absolutistic universe. Every perceptual detail had to have an interpretation, had to teach a lesson. "Let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law," he asks in "The American Scholar," and we will see that "one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench" (69). The interpretive design has to be there, final and fulfilled, in the trifle before we look at it; our apprehension of the eternal law "instantly" turns our perceptive act into a deductive exercise. We begin (as he does in Nature) with the question "to what end is nature?" and, as answer and conclusion, "we apprehend the absolute" (37); there is nothing relative, hypothetical, or even figurative about it in many of Emerson's statements. The knower can even have the deep assurance that "in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds" (64)—there is a Truth and it is the same for all.