Below is the sixth installment in the lecture series on literary theory and criticism by Paul H. Fry. The three two lectures are here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Archive for the ‘Rhetoric’ Category
Paul H. Fry on “Russian Formalism”
In Arts & Letters, Books, Eastern Civilizaton, Fiction, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Rhetoric, Scholarship, Teaching, The Academy, Writing on June 25, 2014 at 8:45 amHolmes’s Dissent in Bartels v. Iowa
In America, American History, Arts & Letters, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Literary Theory & Criticism, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Writing on June 18, 2014 at 8:45 am
Bartels v. Iowa, 262 U.S. 404 (1923), is short and to-the-point, extending and confirming the principles released by the United States Supreme Court that very day in Meyer v. Nebraska,[i] a companion case to Bartels that is also short and to-the-point. In Meyer, the Court struck down a Nebraska law restricting the teaching of modern foreign-languages to students from kindergarten to eighth grade. The majority in Meyer found that the law violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment on the grounds that it infringed upon the liberty interests of teachers, who had a right to practice their profession without the interference of the state with their curriculum so long as that curriculum did not violate explicit State policy.[ii] There was, the Court reasoned, no link between the putative purpose of the law—to protect the welfare of children—and a threat to the public interest.[iii] The law was deemed arbitrary and not reasonably related to a legitimate state interest and, therefore, unconstitutional.
Holmes reserved his Meyers dissent—which maintained that this Nebraska law was constitutional—for the Bartels opinion. In Bartels, the United States Supreme Court addressed an Iowa law similar to the Nebraska regulation and reversed a decision of the Iowa Supreme Court, which had upheld the criminal conviction of a teacher who taught German to his students. “We all agree, I take it,” Holmes began his dissent, “that it is desirable that all the citizens of the United States should speak a common tongue, and therefore that the end aimed at by the statute is a lawful and proper one” (Bartels 412). The pronoun “we” lacks a clear referent. Does Holmes mean “we” justices or “we” Americans? The answer is probably the latter because “we” was (and is) widely and fluidly used to signify the assembled justices on the bench.
Holmes claims that the “only question is whether the means adopted deprive teachers of the liberty secured to them by the Fourteenth Amendment” (Bartels 412). He submits that he will not judge the law according to whether it is good or right but only pursuant to the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment. He states, to that end, that he may “appreciate the objection to the law” (“I think I appreciate the objection to the law”) but that the role of the judge is not to take sides on moral or political issues “upon which men reasonably might differ” (Bartels 412). “I am not prepared to say that it is unreasonable,” Holmes explains, using litotes, “to provide that in his early years [a student] shall hear and speak only English at school” (Bartels 412). If it is not unreasonable, then it is reasonable, and “if it is reasonable it is not an undue restriction of the liberty either of teacher or scholar” (Bartels 412).
Holmes’s dissent in Bartels is not known as one of his most notable or outstanding dissents. Nevertheless, it has been referenced not only by the United States Supreme Court[iv] but also by federal and state courts.[v] Although the majority opinion has never been overruled, Holmes’s dissent generally is cited favorably. My approximate calculation based on Westlaw searches is that this dissent has been cited almost 200 times in cases, administrative decisions, and federal court documents such as amicus curiae briefs.
The topic of his dissent—foreign languages in public schools—has been revisited by later courts because it remains relevant, and in that respect, it is not surprising that the dissent continues to be cited. Yet the topic alone does not explain why Holmes’s dissent in particular remains popular, especially if it is not binding precedent. There are other non-binding documents on the topic, including social science studies and law review articles, that are also relevant but that have not been cited in large numbers. Although Holmes’s reputation has something to do with the abundance of citations to his dissent, insofar as his legal opinion carries great weight among jurists, the properties of his dissent likely contribute to its ongoing appeal.
What are these properties? Besides litotes, mentioned above, there is also aphorism: “No one would doubt that a teacher might be forbidden to teach many things.” These words are carefully chosen. It would be absolutist to state that no one would doubt that a teacher is forbidden to teach many things, or to state that no one doubts rather than no one would doubt that a teacher might be forbidden to teach many things, or to state that no one would doubt that a teacher might be forbidden to teach a particular thing rather than many things. This short sentence is so well qualified that it manages to articulate a pithy generalization without succumbing to embellishment or misrepresentation. Moreover, the phrase “no one would doubt that a teacher might be” is anapestic, sharing the same feet of such memorable verses as “’Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house.”
In the opening line to a dissent about language, the deliberate use of sigmatism, or the repetition of “s” sounds for dramatic effect, is striking: “[…] is desirable that […] citizens of the United States should speak.” It is as if Holmes defamiliarizes the “common tongue” (his words) as he writes about the “time [of youth] when familiarity with a language is established.” At the very least, he highlights the nuances of language in a dissent expressed in nuanced language and addressing the very legality of language acquisition within a public institution. In addition, Holmes empowers his dissent with a religious-like seriousness by referring to his fellow justices as “brethren,” and he appears figuratively to objectify his “mind” as something separate from his “consciousness” when he claims that “I cannot bring my mind to believe.”
These moves are not merely literary grandstanding but the instantiation of an important feature of Holmes’s philosophical pragmatism: the fallibility of human intelligence. He will not profess certainty but will formulate his reasoning only in cautious qualifications.
Holmes follows, therefore, with the declaration that the objection to the prohibition on the teaching of foreign languages in Iowa “appears to me to present a question upon which men reasonably might differ” (my emphasis). His belief in the inherent limitations of human faculties prevents him from saying that the objection does present a question upon which reasonable men may differ.
Having introduced the theme of human knowledge, he turns to metonymy by referring to the state legislation as an “experiment” that the United States Supreme Court should not prevent from taking place. For aught that appears, either the term “experiment” or the state legislation may indicate the other; they are reversible concepts within the paradigm that Holmes establishes here. Treating the states as if they were laboratories, he gestures toward his conviction that the widening capacity of the aggregate knowledge of the community is made possible by allowing social experiments to take place on the most local levels, where the consequences of failure are minimized, whereas the failure of United States Supreme Court justices to rule properly regarding some law or another will have vast consequences that affect social coordination throughout the entire country. Subtle turns of phrase are enough for Holmes to implicate this grand philosophical notion to which he owes his most insightful dissents.
[i]262 U.S. 390 (1923).
[ii] “As the statute undertakes to interfere only with teaching which involves a modern language, leaving complete freedom as to other matters, there seems no adequate foundation for the suggestion that the purpose was to protect the child’s health by limiting his mental activities. It is well known that proficiency in a foreign language seldom comes to one not instructed at an early age, and experience shows that this is not injurious to the health, morals or understanding of the ordinary child.” (Meyer 403)
[iii] “The power of the state to compel attendance at some school and to make reasonable regulations for all schools, including a requirement that they shall give instructions in English, is not questioned. Nor has challenge been made of the state’s power to prescribe a curriculum for institutions which it supports. Those matters are not within the present controversy. Our concern is with the prohibition approved by the Supreme Court. Adams v. Tanner [citation omitted] pointed out that mere abuse incident to an occupation ordinarily useful is not enough to justify its abolition, although regulation may be entirely proper. No emergency has arisen which renders knowledge by a child of some language other than English so clearly harmful as to justify its inhibition with the consequent infringement of rights long freely enjoyed. We are constrained to conclude that the statute as applied is arbitrary and without reasonable relation to any end within the competency of the state.” (Meyer 403).
[iv] Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U.S. 503, 518-19 (1969).
[v] Examples of federal court cases referencing Holmes’s dissent include the following: Yniguez v. Arizonans for Official English, 42 F. 3d 1217, 1242 (9th Cir. App. 1994); Kramer v. New York City Bd. of Educ. 715 F. Supp. 2d 335, 342 (E.D. New York 2010); and Cary v. Board of Ed. of Adams-Arapahoe School Dist. 28-J, Aurora, Colo. 598 F. 2d 535, 540 (10th Circ. App. 1979). Examples of state court cases referencing Holmes’s dissent include State v. Hoyt. 84 N.H. 38, 146 A. 170, 171 (N.H. 1929), and Hamilton v. Deland, 198 N.W. 843, 227 Mich. 111, 113 (Mich. 1924).
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and the Literary Quality of his Prose
In America, American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Emerson, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Law-and-Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Modernism, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Poetry, Rhetoric, Writing on June 11, 2014 at 8:45 am
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s writings are known for their literary qualities. The Class Poet at Harvard, the son of a famous poet, and a lifelong devotee of Emerson, Holmes often rendered his judicial writings in poetic prose. Consider the following lines from Gitlow v. New York, which I have reformulated as a poem:
Gitlow v. New York[i]
A Poem[ii] (1925)
Every idea
is an incitement.
It offers itself for belief
and if believed
it is acted on
unless some other belief
outweighs it
or some failure of energy
stifles the movement
at its birth.
The only difference
between the expression
of an opinion and an incitement
in the narrower sense
is the speaker’s enthusiasm
for the result.
Eloquence may set fire
to reason.
But whatever may be thought
of the redundant discourse
before us
it had no chance of starting
a present conflagration.
The plain, raw idioms and variable feet in these lines resemble those characteristically employed by Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Holmes’s language here is similar in tone and rhythm to Williams’s in “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which was published just two years before this dissent. Holmes’s alliterative use of the letter “n” emphasizes mobility, momentum, and ignition: “incitement,” “energy,” “movement,” “incitement,” “enthusiasm,” “conflagration.” These nouns suggest provocation, stimulus, instigation; they are tied to ideas themselves, as in the line “every idea is an incitement,” hence the correspondingly alliterative “n” sounds in the words “expression” and “reason.” The metrical regularity of “Every,” “offers it…,” “for belief,” “failure of,” “energy,” “stifles the,” “at its birth,” “difference,” “narrower,” “Eloquence,” and “had no chance” accents the activity associated with thinking insofar as these dactylic words and phrases pertain to ideas or beliefs. Holmes follows a series of dactyls with spondaic feet just as he describes the possibility of combustion: “Eloquence [stress / slack / slack] may set fire [stress / stress / stress / slack] to reason [stress / stress / slack].” It is as though he wishes to create the sense of building pressure and then of sudden release or combustion. Two unstressed lines abruptly interrupt the heightened tension; the first appears with the transitional conjunction “But,” which signals a change in the tone. Holmes appears to reverse the intensity and calm his diction as he assures us that the “redundant discourse,” a phrase made cacophonous by the alliterative “d” and “s” sounds, has “no chance of starting a present conflagration.” A sudden move to iambic feet and hence to a lightened tone rounds out these lines and suggests that Holmes has smothered or extinguished whatever energy had been building with the three-syllable feet. These lines have become some of the most famous in American constitutional history most likely because of their memorable qualities, which contributed to the eventual vindication of the dissent.
Be that as it may, feet and meter are basic to English speech and writing and may be displayed in many other legal writings by less able judges and justices. It would be difficult to prove that Holmes deliberately set out to invest these lines with literary features, at least those pertaining to alliteration and feet. Holmes no doubt had an ear for language and probably intended to employ alliteration, rhythm, and rhyme in his writings, but how far does his intent extend? Does the scanning exercise above give Holmes too much credit and attribute to his writings undeserved praise? There is no empirical way to answer this question, but the speculation is, I think, worth the time.
[i] Gitlow v. N.Y., 268 U.S. 652 (1925).
[ii] My addition.
Paul H. Fry’s “The New Criticism and Other Western Formalisms”
In Academia, American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, Communication, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Poetry, Rhetoric, Scholarship, The Academy, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on May 28, 2014 at 8:45 amTranscendental Liberty
In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Creativity, Emerson, Essays, Ethics, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Philosophy, Poetry, Politics, Property, Rhetoric, Western Philosophy, Writing on January 15, 2014 at 8:45 am
This essay originally appeared here in The Freeman.
“The less government we have, the better.” So declared Ralph Waldo Emerson, a man not usually treated as a classical liberal. Yet this man—the Sage of Concord—held views that cannot be described as anything but classical liberal or libertarian.
None other than Cornel West, no friend of the free market, has said that “Emerson is neither a liberal nor a conservative and certainly not a socialist or even a civic republican. Rather he is a petit bourgeois libertarian, with at times anarchist tendencies and limited yet genuine democratic sentiments.” An abundance of evidence supports this view. Emerson was, after all, the man who extolled the “infinitude of the private man.” One need only look at one of Emerson’s most famous essays, “Self Reliance,” for evidence of his libertarianism.
“Self-Reliance” is perhaps the most exhilarating expression of individualism ever written, premised as it is on the idea that each of us possesses a degree of genius that can be realized through confidence, intuition, and nonconformity. “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,” Emerson proclaims, “that is genius.”
Genius, then, is a belief in the awesome power of the human mind and in its ability to divine truths that, although comprehended differently by each individual, are common to everyone. Not all genius, on this view, is necessarily or universally right, since genius is, by definition, a belief only, not a definite reality. Yet it is a belief that leads individuals to “trust thyself” and thereby to realize their fullest potential and to energize their most creative faculties. Such self-realization has a spiritual component insofar as “nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind” and “no law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.”
According to Emerson, genius precedes society and the State, which corrupt rather than clarify reasoning and which thwart rather than generate productivity. History shows that great minds have challenged the conventions and authority of society and the State and that “great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side.” Accordingly, we ought to refuse to “capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.” We ought, that is, to be deliberate, nonconformist pursuers of truth rather than of mere apprehensions of truth prescribed for us by others. “Whoso would be a man,” Emerson says, “must be a noncomformist.”
Self-Interest and Conviction
For Emerson, as for Ayn Rand, rational agents act morally by pursuing their self-interests, including self-interests in the well-being of family, friends, and neighbors, who are known and tangible companions rather than abstract political concepts. In Emerson’s words, “The only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.” Or: “Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.”
It is not that self-assurance equates with rightness, or that stubbornness is a virtue; it is that confidence in what one knows and believes is a condition precedent to achieving one’s goals. Failures are inevitable, as are setbacks; only by exerting one’s will may one overcome the failures and setbacks that are needed to achieve success.
If, as Emerson suggests, a “man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he,” how should he treat the poor? Emerson supplies this answer:
Do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies;—though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
These lines require qualification. Emerson is not damning philanthropy or charity categorically or unconditionally; after all, he will, he says, go to prison for certain individuals with whom he shares a special relationship. He is, instead, pointing out, with much exhibition, that one does not act morally simply by giving away money without conviction or to subsidize irresponsible, unsustainable, or exploitative business activities. It is not moral to give away a little money that you do not care to part with, or to fund an abstract cause when you lack knowledge of, and have no stake in, its outcome. Only when you give money to people or causes with which you are familiar, and with whom or which you have something at stake, is your gift meaningful; and it is never moral to give for show or merely to please society. To give morally, you must mean to give morally—and have something to lose.
Dissent
Emerson famously remarks that a “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Much ink has been spilled to explain (or explain away) these lines. I take them to mean, in context, that although servile flattery and showy sycophancy may gain a person recognition and popularity, they will not make that person moral or great but, instead, weak and dependent. There is no goodness or greatness in a consistency imposed from the outside and against one’s better judgment; many ideas and practices have been consistently bad and made worse by their very consistency. “With consistency,” therefore, as Emerson warns, “a great soul has simply nothing to do.”
Ludwig von Mises seems to have adopted the animating, affirming individualism of Emerson, and even, perhaps, Emerson’s dictum of nonconformity. Troping Emerson, Mises remarks that “literature is not conformism, but dissent.” “Those authors,” he adds, “who merely repeat what everybody approves and wants to hear are of no importance. What counts alone is the innovator, the dissenter, the harbinger of things unheard of, the man who rejects the traditional standards and aims at substituting new values and ideas for old ones.” This man does not mindlessly stand for society and the State and their compulsive institutions; he is “by necessity anti-authoritarian and anti-governmental, irreconcilably opposed to the immense majority of his contemporaries. He is precisely the author whose books the greater part of the public does not buy.” He is, in short, an Emersonian, as Mises himself was.
The Marketplace of Ideas
To be truly Emersonian, you may not accept the endorsements and propositions in this article as unconditional truth, but must, instead, read Emerson and Mises and Rand for yourself to see whether their individualism is alike in its affirmation of human agency resulting from inspirational nonconformity. If you do so with an inquiring seriousness, while trusting the integrity of your own impressions, you will, I suspect, arrive at the same conclusion I have reached.
There is an understandable and powerful tendency among libertarians to consider themselves part of a unit, a movement, a party, or a coalition, and of course it is fine and necessary to celebrate the ways in which economic freedom facilitates cooperation and harmony among groups or communities; nevertheless, there is also a danger in shutting down debate and in eliminating competition among different ideas, which is to say, a danger in groupthink or compromise, in treating the market as an undifferentiated mass divorced from the innumerable transactions of voluntarily acting agents. There is, too, the tendency to become what Emerson called a “retained attorney” who is able to recite talking points and to argue predictable “airs of opinion” without engaging the opposition in a meaningful debate.
Emerson teaches not only to follow your convictions but to engage and interact with others, lest your convictions be kept to yourself and deprived of any utility. It is the free play of competing ideas that filters the good from the bad; your ideas aren’t worth a lick until you’ve submitted them to the test of the marketplace.
“It is easy in the world,” Emerson reminds us, “to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” Let us stand together by standing alone.
Literature and Liberty: Essays in Libertarian Literary Criticism
In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Books, Economics, Emerson, Fiction, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Imagination, Justice, Law-and-Literature, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, News and Current Events, News Release, Novels, Philosophy, Politics, Property, Rhetoric, Shakespeare, The Novel, Transnational Law, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on November 15, 2013 at 8:46 am
My forthcoming book, Literature and Liberty: Essays in Libertarian Literary Criticism, is now available for pre-order here at Amazon.com or here at Rowman & Littlefield’s website. From the cover:
The economic theories of Karl Marx and his disciples continue to be anthologized in books of literary theory and criticism and taught in humanities classrooms to the exclusion of other, competing economic paradigms. Marxism is collectivist, predictable, monolithic, impersonal, linear, reductive — in short, wholly inadequate as an instrument for good in an era when we know better than to reduce the variety of human experience to simplistic formulae. A person’s creative and intellectual energies are never completely the products of culture or class. People are rational agents who choose between different courses of action based on their reason, knowledge, and experience. A person’s choices affect lives, circumstances, and communities. Even literary scholars who reject pure Marxism are still motivated by it, because nearly all economic literary theory derives from Marxism or advocates for vast economic interventionism as a solution to social problems.
Such interventionism, however, has a track-record of mass murder, war, taxation, colonization, pollution, imprisonment, espionage, and enslavement — things most scholars of imaginative literature deplore. Yet most scholars of imaginative literature remain interventionists. Literature and Liberty offers these scholars an alternative economic paradigm, one that over the course of human history has eliminated more generic bads than any other system. It argues that free market or libertarian literary theory is more humane than any variety of Marxism or interventionism. Just as Marxist historiography can be identified in the use of structuralism and materialist literary theory, so should free-market libertarianism be identifiable in all sorts of literary theory. Literature and Liberty disrupts the near monopolistic control of economic ideas in literary studies and offers a new mode of thinking for those who believe that arts and literature should play a role in discussions about law, politics, government, and economics. Drawing from authors as wide-ranging as Emerson, Shakespeare, E.M. Forster, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Henry Hazlitt, and Mark Twain, Literature and Liberty is a significant contribution to libertarianism and literary studies.
Book Note: Machinic Modernism, by Beatrice Monaco
In Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Fiction, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Modernism, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Western Philosophy, Writing on September 20, 2012 at 8:45 am
The following excerpt first appeared as part of the Routledge Annotated Bibliography of English Studies series.
Machinic Modernism: The Deleuzian Literary Machines of Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce
This book investigates several modernist novels in light of the theories of Gilles Deleuze and, to a slightly lesser degree, Felix Guattari. The author is interested in how the “machine-like” work and style of Deleuze and Guattari facilitate pragmatic readings of texts. These pragmatic readings suggest that textual activity in several modernist novels reflects broader cultural activities, that the metaphysical movement of text corresponds to various social movements, and that text reproduces historical circumstances in signs and syntax.
The book seeks to depart from conventional forms of scholarship and to resist Deleuze-Guattarian paradigms that overemphasize pragmatism and empiricism at the expense of radical innovation. In a way this book is a Deleuze-Guattarian treatment of Deleuze and Guattarian with a focus on key modernist novels such as Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Just as Deleuze and Guattari reframe seminal issues of philosophy in terms of pragmatism, so these modernist novels negotiate cultural and discursive phenomena with a bearing on then-current philosophy.
This book seeks to build a critical “machine” with which to interpret the machine in texts as well as to negotiate the so-called machine age; it also interrogates the organic-mechanic duality already interrogated by Deleuze. In so doing, it considers differences in literature in light of Deleuzian pragmatics to show that the philosophical moves taking place in Deleuze reflect similar moves taking place in modernist literature generally. The book argues that To the Lighthouse and The Rainbow implicate metaphysical structures in interesting ways but also in ways that are not entirely satisfactory without an understanding of Ulysses. In Ulysses the theories and mechanic imperatives of Deleuzian modernism find their fullest expression.
Kenneth Burke’s Constitution: In Brief
In Arts & Letters, Communication, Humanities, Information Design, Literary Theory & Criticism, Philosophy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Semiotics, Western Philosophy on August 8, 2012 at 8:45 am
Kenneth Burke treats the constitution—or, in some cases, constitutions—as a dialectic, symbolic act that is representative of the tendencies and preferences of communities. Burke applies the elements of the pentad—act, agency, agent, scene, and purpose—to form what he calls paradigmatic anecdotes for understanding how constitutions apply to and interact with communities. The pentad, for Burke, is equipment for simplifying complex ideas into understandable categories or anecdotes. It provides, in that sense, what he calls an “idiom of reduction” for understanding human motives.
Humans are sign-using creatures motivated by different “grammars,” and it is a grammatical move to interpret human action in terms of the pentad. A constitution is not simply a tangible document—indeed, as Burke points out, there is no written constitution in Britain—but instead represents a symbol of the coordination of individuals that provides them with a calculus for determining not only how to act, but also how to know what motivates action.
Constitutions put forth general types, or principles, that can be considered ideals, and these types, principles, or ideals provide standards or criteria by which individuals in a community aspire to act. A constitution is therefore more of a symbol of that which coordinates human behavior within a given community than it is a top-down imposition of legislative fiat. A constitution, in short, is a communicative sign validated and made useful by its ability to induce cooperation among people.
Sidney Morgenbesser on the American Pragmatists
In America, American History, Arts & Letters, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Nineteenth-Century America, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Rhetoric, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on June 13, 2012 at 8:00 amSidney Morgenbesser was a philosophy professor at Columbia University. Among his students were Jerry Fodor, Raymond Geuss, Robert Nozick, and Derek Parfit. In the following videos, Professor Morgenbesser speaks to Bryan Magee about the American Pragmatists.
Section One
Section Two
Section Three
Section Four
Section Five
Emersonian Individualism
In America, American History, Art, Arts & Letters, Creativity, Emerson, Epistemology, Essays, Humanities, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Philosophy, Poetry, Politics, Pragmatism, Rhetoric, Santayana, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on April 4, 2012 at 6:48 am
The following essay originally appeared here at Mises Daily.
Ralph Waldo Emerson is politically elusive. He’s so elusive that thinkers from various schools and with various agendas have appropriated his ideas to validate some activity or another. Harold Bloom once wrote, “In the United States, we continue to have Emersonians of the Left (the post-Pragmatist Richard Rorty) and of the Right (a swarm of libertarian Republicans, who exalt President Bush the Second).”[1] We’ll have to excuse Bloom’s ignorance of political movements and signifiers — libertarians who exalt President Bush, really? — and focus instead on Bloom’s point that Emerson’s influence is evident in a wide array of contemporary thinkers and causes.
Bloom is right that what “matters most about Emerson is that he is the theologian of the American religion of Self-Reliance.”[2] Indeed, the essay “Self-Reliance” remains the most cited of Emerson’s works, and American politicians and intellectuals selectively recycle ideas of self-reliance in the service of often disparate goals.
Emerson doesn’t use the term “individualism” in “Self-Reliance,” which was published in 1841, when the term “individualism” was just beginning to gain traction. Tocqueville unintentionally popularized the signifier “individualism” with the publication of Democracy in America. He used a French term that had no counterpart in English. Translators of Tocqueville labored over this French term because its signification wasn’t part of the English lexicon. Emerson’s first mention of “individualism” was not until 1843.
It is clear, though, that Emerson’s notion of self-reliance was tied to what later would be called “individualism.” Emerson’s individualism was so radical that it bordered on self-deification. Only through personal will could one realize the majesty of God. Nature for Emerson was like the handwriting of God, and individuals with a poetical sense — those who had the desire and capability to “read” nature — could understand nature’s universal, divine teachings.
Lakes, streams, meadows, forests — these and other phenomena were, according to Emerson, sources of mental and spiritual pleasure or unity. They were what allowed one to become “part and parcel with God,” if only one had or could become a “transparent eyeball.” “Nothing at last is sacred,” Emerson said, “but the integrity of your own mind.” That’s because a person’s intellect translates shapes and forms into spiritual insights.
We cannot judge Emerson exclusively on the basis of his actions. Emerson didn’t always seem self-reliant or individualistic. His politics, to the extent that they are knowable, could not be called libertarian. We’re better off judging Emerson on the basis of his words, which could be called libertarian, even if they endow individualism with a religiosity that would make some people uncomfortable.
Emerson suggests in “Self-Reliance” that the spontaneous expression of thought or feeling is more in keeping with personal will, and hence with the natural world as constituted by human faculties, than that which is passively assumed or accepted as right or good, or that which conforms to social norms. Emerson’s individualism or self-reliance exalted human intuition, which precedes reflection, and it privileged the will over the intellect. Feeling and sensation are antecedent to reason, and Emerson believed that they registered moral truths more important than anything cognition could summon forth.
Emerson’s transcendentalism was, as George Santayana pointed out in 1911, a method conducive to the 19-century American mindset.[3] As a relatively new nation seeking to define itself, America was split between two mentalities, or two sources of what Santayana called the “genteel tradition”: Calvinism and transcendentalism.
The American philosophical tradition somehow managed to reconcile these seeming dualities. On the one hand, Calvinism taught that the self was bad, that man was depraved by nature and saved only by the grace of God. On the other hand, transcendentalism taught that the self was good, that man was equipped with creative faculties that could divine the presence of God in the world. The Calvinist distrusted impulses and urges as sprung from an inner evil. The transcendentalist trusted impulses and urges as moral intuition preceding society’s baseless judgments and prevailing conventions.
What these two philosophies had in common was an abiding awareness of sensation and perception: a belief that the human mind registers external data in meaningful and potentially spiritual ways. The Calvinist notion of limited disclosure — that God reveals his glory through the natural world — played into the transcendentalists’ conviction that the natural world supplied instruments for piecing together divinity.
The problem for Santayana is that transcendentalism was just a method, a way of tapping into one’s poetical sense. What one did after that was unclear. Santayana thought that transcendentalism was the right method, but he felt that Emerson didn’t use that method to instruct us in practical living. Transcendentalism was a means to an end, but not an end itself.
According to Santayana, Emerson “had no system” because he merely “opened his eyes on the world every morning with a fresh sincerity, marking how things seemed to him then, or what they suggested to his spontaneous fancy.”[4] Emerson did not seek to group all senses and impressions into a synthetic whole. Nor did he suggest a politics toward which senses and impressions ought to lead. Santayana stops short of accusing Emerson of advancing an “anything-goes” metaphysics. But Santayana does suggest that Emerson failed to advance a set of principles; instead, Emerson gave us a technique for arriving at a set of principles. Emerson provided transportation, but gave no direction. This shortcoming — if it is a shortcoming — might explain why Bloom speaks of the “paradox of Emerson’s influence,” namely, that “Peace Marchers and Bushians alike are Emerson’s heirs in his dialectics of power.”[5]
For Emerson, human will is paramount. It moves the intellect to create. It is immediate, not mediate. In other words, it is the sense or subjectivity that is not yet processed by the human mind. We ought to trust the integrity of will and intuition and avoid the dictates and decorum of society.
“Society,” Emerson says, “everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” Society corrupts the purity of the will by forcing individuals to second-guess their impulses and to look to others for moral guidance. Against this socialization, Emerson declares, “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.”
Emerson’s nonconformist ethic opposed habits of thinking, which society influenced but did not determine. Emerson famously stated that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. What he meant, I think, is that humans ought to improve themselves by tapping into intuitive truths. Nature, with her figures, forms, and outlines, provides images that the individual can harness to create beauty and energize the self. Beauty therefore does not exist in the world; rather, the human mind makes beauty out of the externalities it has internalized. Beauty, accordingly, resides within us, but only after we create it.
Here we see something similar to Ayn Rand’s Objectivism stripped of its appeals to divinity. Rand believed that reality existed apart from the thinking subject, that the thinking subject employs reason and logic to make sense of experience and perception, and that the self or will is instrumental in generating meaning from the phenomenal world. Read the rest of this entry »
The Literary Lawyer: A Forum for the Legal and Literary Communities 