After Emerson by John T. Lysaker

Author:John T. Lysaker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2017-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

NOTES

1. I introduce and use this notion across Emerson and Self-Culture (Lysaker 2008, 7–8, 68–70).

2. Not that their hectoring led Emerson to reject the abolitionists’ aim. “The professed aim of the abolitionist is to awaken the conscience of the Northern States in the hope thereby to awaken the conscience of the southern states: a hope just & sublime” (JMN12, 153).

3. I should also note that Emerson believed that politics was only capable of reflecting the self-culture of citizens. “But the wise know that … the State must follow, and not lead the character and progress of the citizen … and that the form of government which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it” (CW3, 117–118). I thus do not share Anita Goldman’s view that “Emerson’s recognition in his early writings that rights do not provide a sound enough basis for thinking about America as a nation simultaneously leads him to develop a concept of race,” if only because “thinking about America as a nation” is not his principal concern (1994, 182).

4. I thus partially share Len Gougeon’s insistence that we always set Emerson’s remarks on race within the dialectic of his thought. As Gougeon notes, these remarks are “elements of a thought process and not a final product” (2014, 200). But, and I think Gougeon underplays this, most are sincerely ventured as holding true for Emerson, if only in a partial manner. Emerson is not merely entertaining them but giving himself to them and letting them take him where they will, although, when the dust settles, he no doubt will allow a new thought to contest wherever he had landed.

5. The work of freedom (and constitutional amending) that Cavell finds exemplified by the essay “Fate” is akin to what I cast as the reforming work of credence. I am not denying, therefore, that the kind of work Cavell locates in “Fate” is operative in Emerson. I think it is, and I have tried to develop it in my own way in chapter 7 of Emerson and Self-Culture (2008). But I don’t think “Fate” exemplifies this work very well and certainly not as an oblique condemnation of slavery. Moreover, I think taking it in this way, and exclusively so, obscures how “Fate” is racist in disturbing ways.

6. Even more examples can be found in the journals. Here is one from 1853, titled “Race”:

“I adjourn the question of race, for it is too early. When we have got the names Celt, Saxon, Roman, we are still only using an / arbitrary / idle / & superficial distinction, as if we classified people by the street in which they lived. The foundations of race are not in anatomy, but in metaphysics. Temperament which tyrannizes over family-lines derives from moral & elemental causes, & the existence of individual men as of man himself shrouds the moral laws. There is a profound instinct stirring all the new interest of mankind in race, and which, beginning at the most

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