I am re-reading Emerson’s essay “Nature” and finding myself mostly annoyed by it. I have long admired Emerson, the writer once referred to as the “indispensable man” in American letters, having studied him a little in both undergrad and grad school, visited his house in Concord back in the 70s and again in 2018 with Russ, and admired and partaken of his Unitarianism as a teenager. I came to love the gestalt of Concord, inhabited by Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Louisa Mae Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. It became a town of my imagination, its winters, springs, summers, and falls all easily summonable. For me, Walden Pond was the hub of this “hub of the universe,” Thoreau being, for me, the true central figure whose present and continuing fame seems to have slightly eclipsed the seventeen-years-older Emerson. Emerson was an essayist and poet, but no single work of his quite captures the enduring impact of Walden, and I wonder if any of his essays—as famous as “Nature,” “The Divinity School Address,” “Self-Reliance,” “The American Scholar,” and others are—has had the continuing appeal of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.”
So, despite my greater affinity for Henry, why does this other man I admire annoy me with his “Nature”? It is true that I have drifted a bit toward Mencken’s opinion of meta-physics, in which the meta is that vast unseen world and universe which provide much room for philosophical speculation and for mischief. Being good Transcendentalists, both Thoreau and Emerson enjoy the interplay of the objective, concrete world and what they see as the meta-physical world. But where Thoreau, in the introductory “Economy” chapter of Walden, anchors his grand Transcendentalist vision of living an “economical” life unencumbered by a thousand superfluous objects and (for him) frivolous diversions in the prosaic business of buying a few nails and boards to build his cabin, Emerson flies higher, and thus is less appealing and more obscure. I get lost in the empyrean sublimity of his prose. One might think of Aristophanes’ portrait of Socrates, hovering over the earth in The Clouds, holding forth with his speculations and queries, a slightly fatuous old man whose un-sandaled feet don’t touch the ground. Magically teleported forward twenty-two centuries to Emerson’s day, would Aristophanes put the Concord sage on an even higher plane, looking down and jousting with Socrates?
Emerson is capable of concision, but his attraction to spirit and God and soul call him to Olympus. His prose teeter-totters between rapturous metaphor and an anthropomorphic nature-spirit bordering on the incomprehensible. Take this barbarous sentence suggesting the latter:
“We learn that the highest [truth] is present to the soul of man; that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; one and not compound it does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves: therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old.”
This, for a fellow like me chained to the soil, is flying high indeed. We do have a nice simile at the end, but it is swimming against a fierce meta-physical current to get there. I love a comma as much as anyone, but dear Waldo, the period is not the harbinger of the bubonic plague. True, some of Jeremy Bentham’s sentences crush your mere 120 word-storm for sheer volubility, but his is a dubious prize. Yes, a contemporary critic must avoid the fallacy of presentism and not scorn the author for a style no longer in vogue—in this case sometimes horizonless sentences floating in the stratosphere. The same may be said for his use of whence, whereto, whilst, even saith. But I don’t recall those words in Thoreau (I could be wrong here), even though the last sentence of Walden does aspire to that empyrean sublimity Emerson both achieves and is guilty of.
As the uber Transcendentalist, as well as Platonist, theist, and mystic, Emerson has no particular objection to the senses except when they blind us to what is beyond or behind them, namely, God, spirit, Ideas, and the all-encompassing Over-soul (a term not mentioned in “Nature”). Which apparently is often. He approvingly quotes an unnamed poet: “The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit.” He refers to “this despotism of the senses”—a Platonic idea for certain—and wishes to “build science on ideas,” presumably rather than building it on observed facts. “Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and by the very knowledge of functions and processes to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole.” Such a fate “leaves me in the splendid labyrinth of my perceptions, to wander without end”—a gorgeous metaphor, meant to warn. I wish that he could acknowledge that in climbing out of the labyrinth he might also see chimeras, intuiting things that might not exist. Of course finding the supernatural behind the natural and the sublime in the minuscule is the Transcendentalist’s stock-in-trade, and the minister’s too. It is what they do. We can appreciate his search for the divine in the material, the meta beyond the physics; but both Emerson and his admirers (of whom I am one) should take care not to let the fruits of that search devolve into dogmatism or self-delusion.
We Are Ukraine
January 25, 2023 at 1:10 am (Ethics, Political Commentary)
Support for Ukraine in its just war with Russia is the twenty-first century’s moral imperative just as abolitionism was the moral imperative of the nineteenth century. If you would have been opposed to slavery then, you must be supportive of Ukraine now. That is, you must be willing to provide Ukraine with the weaponry it needs to defend itself and not be grudging and tightfisted about it. Had you been a Southerner in 1850, a word or act against slavery would have been courageous because it could be dangerous. Today, the only danger Americans face in giving Ukraine weapons is a small dent in the nation’s bank account. (By contrast to the less than $100 billion we have given Ukraine, an estimated $600 billion is lost to that bank account each year due to uncollected but legally due federal taxes.) But there are other dangers if we and other democracies don’t help Ukraine. I have always hated a bully (see “Was the Third Kid Wrong?”), and Putin’s bullying is a huge part of this war. But there are other bullies and authoritarians and totalitarians looking on, and so the stakes are truly higher. Not being able to improve on Tom Nichols’ wise assessment, I quote him:
If Russia finally captures Ukraine by mass murder, torture, and nuclear threats, then everything the world has gained since the defeat of the Axis in 1945 and the end of the Cold War in 1991 will be in mortal peril. Putin will prove to himself and to every dictator on the planet that nothing has changed since Hitler, that lawless nations can achieve their aims by using force at will, by killing and raping innocent people and then literally grinding their ashes into the dirt. This is no longer about Russia’s neo-imperial dreams or Ukraine’s borders: This is a fight for the future of the international system and the safety of us all.
Like Nichols, I normally consider South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham to be little more than a Trumpian lickspittle. Well, Nichols didn’t call him that, but he was being nice. But Nichols notes approvingly that Graham stood with two Democrats to complain about American and German reluctance to send Abrams and Leopard tanks, respectively, to Ukraine. Many months ago, I saw that Graham said the same thing that was on my mind then and now: Russia needs a successful Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the German patriot who attempted but failed to assassinate Hitler in 1944. No other politician was, or is, saying that. By contrast, Speaker of the House McCarthy, likely to be the weakest Speaker in memory after caving to far-right demands from fellow House Republicans, has already said that Ukraine should not get a “blank check,” and a recent poll showed that almost half of Republicans say we are already giving too much to Ukraine. This is the same amoral stand—indifference—taken by too many pre-Civil War Northerners toward slavery. Lincoln could not even use slavery as the moral impetus for the North going to war, knowing how unpersuasive it would be to so many. He had to argue that the casus belli was to preserve the Union.
It was not too many decades ago that the GOP considered Democrats soft on communism—primarily the USSR. Those tables have now turned. Trump practically embraced Putin, and Trump still has influence. We cannot return to the isolationism of 1914 or 1940. For those getting wobbly on support for Ukraine for fiscal reasons, and for others unmoved by Russia’s scorched-earth policy and the grim deaths of old women and children due to Putin’s indisputable war crimes, they should consider that if Putin wins, we and other democratic nations lose, and we might even find ourselves in a wider war. Robust, full-throated military and humanitarian support for Ukraine is the first international moral test of this century.
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