‘I grieve that grief can teach me nothing’ Emerson, Grief, and the Annihilation of History Justyna Fruzińska The paper analyzes two essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Experience” and “History.” Taking as its point of departure a discussion of Emersonian idealism and its consequences for the writer’s experience of losing his son Waldo addressed in the former text, the paper argues that Emersonian idealism, instead of questioning the reality of the external world, tends to incorporate it within the subject. This can be most clearly seen in “History,” an essay in which history is perceived in a way that eradicates its otherness, turning the past into present. The article explores two tendencies coexisting in Emerson’s writings: one of integration and separation, and, referring to the Freudian category of melancholia, shows that grief as described in “Experience” may be read as related to either of them. “Experience” and “History” are two essays which perfectly illustrate two points Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writing is suspended between: his idealism and his need for a recognition of the world’s reality, its tangibility. Looking at it from another angle, both essays discuss idealism, but while “History” may be seen as an epitome of Emersonian enthusiasm for the dissolution of the real, “Experience” gives voice to despair born out of this very “unhandsome” (as he puts it) character of things. This article investigates Emersonian idealism and examines whether indeed the views expressed in these two essays constitute absolute polarities of Emerson’s thought. As many critics have pointed out, the central emotional problem of “Experience” - the writer’s inability to fully acknowledge his son’s death - seems to be a direct consequence of his idealistic philosophy. If the outside world, external to the self, is at least unimportant (and there are AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 44 (2019) · Heft 2 Gunther Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2019-0007 Justyna Fruzińska 160 many passages in Emerson’s essays which would suggest that it may even be non-existent), then this belief should hold true also for the traumatic experience of Waldo’s death. One must note that it is difficult to identify in Emerson’s texts a coherent system of ideas, since his writing takes him in different and often contradictory directions. He tends to use the same words in different ways depending on the context (a famous example being “Nature,” with the eponymous term taken in what he calls its common and its philosophical sense). Having said that, at least in the part of “Experience” dealing specifically with grief, Emerson’s idealism seems at first glance closer to Kant’s than to, for example, Berkeley’s. That is, what he disbelieves when speaking of Waldo’s death is not the existence of the external world, nor even its importance when compared to the world of ideas, but the human possibility of knowing the world as it is. Emerson is not discrediting the material world; he is mourning its unattainability, the fact that all we can ever know are ideas. In this essay, Emerson wishes not to be an idealist, but rather to believe in the external world, and, what is more, to experience it directly. He hopes that pain is what can make the world become more approachable: “There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth” (“Experience” 230). This, unfortunately, does not happen; the grief he feels after Waldo’s death is in a sense philosophically useless: “it never introduces me into reality” (“Experience” 230). There is always an “innavigable sea” between us and the world, meaning that we can never experience things as they are and even less become one with them. Still, we try to grasp the world, which breeds only frustration: “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition,” Emerson says (“Experience” 231). The world is evasive, dissolving almost into a liquid under human touch, and yet at the same time solid, resistant to cognition, fenced off. In Stanley Cavell’s words, “The feeling as if we have to penetrate phenomena is evidently produced by a feeling of some barrier to or resistance in phenomena” (118). In any case, whether too liquid or too solid, the world of facts is, as is America in the same essay, “unapproachable” (244). It is like Kant’s thing-in-itself, always unknowable to the knower, and Emerson would like to transcend this natural limitation of human perception. Paraphrasing the famous passage in Nature, one might say that in the fragments of “Experience” dealing with how we see the world, there is nothing but the opaque eye-ball: our perception always tints its objects. Emerson speaks of the “many-coloured lenses” through which we look at things (231) - an optical term just like Nature’s “transparent eyeball.” However, while the famous reference to the eye-ball in Nature uses organic metaphors, the “lenses” in “Experience” could be seen as technological, that is - artificial. This choice of vocabulary adds to the overall sadness of Emerson, Grief, and the Annihilation of History 161 the constatation about man being limited by his own faculties. It is as if we no longer see the world through our eyes - only through “lenses.” Of course, the suffering present in “Experience” is connected not only to the fact that Emerson wishes for a direct, unmediated contact with the world, but also because of the specific experience of a son’s loss - an experience especially troubling if it seems unreal. “Something which I fancied was a part of me, - which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar,” Emerson states (“Experience” 230). While the child seemed to be organically connected with the father, his death is only a mere idea. Cavell points to the fact that (as many critics have stressed before) Emerson never pronounces his son’s name in the essay, adding that Waldo was Emerson’s preferred name for himself (125). Thus, one might say his unwillingness or inability to admit that he has lost “Waldo” is a textual expression of the limitation he speaks of: he thought such death would mutilate him while it “leaves no scar”; he feels precisely that he did not lose any part of himself - that is, not a “Waldo.” 1 One may find here an interesting connection with Freud’s understanding of melancholia as opposed to mourning: Emerson cannot grieve as he would like to because, like a melancholic patient, he has identified with the lost object (both of them are Waldos, after all) and entombed it within himself. That is, while the essay suggests the problem is that Waldo’s death is too external (Emerson famously complaining “I cannot get it nearer to me” (230)), psychoanalytically speaking, one may see just the reverse being the case: Waldo is in fact too near to be properly mourned. This ties in with another remark made by Stanley Cavell, that the phrase “I cannot get it nearer to me” means in fact “there is no nearer for him to get since he is already there; somehow that itself is what is disappointing, that this is what there is” (133). Perhaps this is exactly why Waldo’s death seems to Emerson so underwhelming: already “being there” is precisely the problem; experiencing a loss requires a distance he does not have. This reading, obviously far from taking Emerson at face value, would suggest that the source of the whole trouble is not a Kantian idealism, in which reality is unapproachable, but a different, Emersonian idealism - one might say, consuming or incorporating experience to the extent that it dissolves. This particular brand of Emersonian individualism, and what it does to the external world in his writings, is especially visible in his essay “History.” Emerson’s philosophy, postulating the existence of one universal being underlying all its specific manifestations, when applied to history turns out to yield notably interesting results. One may see Emerson’s unifying impulse in a passage in which he speaks of the development of 1 Striking a more literal note, Ryan White suggests Emerson’s refusal to name Waldo stems from Puritanism’s distrust of excessive mourning (296). Justyna Fruzińska 162 human cultures, stating: “We are all rovers and all fixtures by turns, and pretty rapid turns” (“History” 18). Nineteenth-century thought, when dealing with human societies, was obsessed with classification, having inherited from the Enlightenment the conception of the stadial theory, and wishing to see in human history a linear, progressive development. Emerson, on the other hand, believes that nomadic and agricultural lifestyles are not antagonistic, since his vision of history is rather one of a cyclical game than a teleological progression. The differences science focuses on are mere appearance, hiding the true, unified nature of the world. History is for Emerson an unfolding of a single entity, the Oversoul, which permeates all of humanity. In his desire for unity, the writer claims that while from up close history may look chaotic and accidental, a pattern emerges from a distance. This is a statement similar to the one found in “Self-Reliance,” in which Emerson argues against consistency, stating that in any case, “These varieties [of one’s life] are lost sight of when seen at a little distance, at a little height of thought” (38). What is true of the individual life is also true of history, because history is to Emerson a larger version of the same universal current. This parallel between history and a single human life allows Emerson to undertake a peculiar treatment of the past. Since for Emerson genius is universal and representative, and since all men have a common source, one can easily see oneself in the great men of the past: “I can see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline” (“History” 8). This identification with historical figures suggests not only our equality to men of genius - it also brings us on a par, importantly, with men of the past. This, for Emerson, is what accounts for our interest in history: it seems to us relevant because we can easily identify with people from the past, knowing we would have behaved and felt the same; their lives can be appealing only insofar as they remind us of ourselves (which actually is a deeply egotistic motivation). Such a view leaves no room for reading about history because of empathy or curiosity about the other, since both empathy and curiosity rely upon a presupposition that other people are not us. Assuming that the difference between the self and the other is merely apparent, Emerson urges his reader to “transfer the point of view from which history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens and London to himself” (“History” 10). This has of course also profoundly political consequences, because if life is not about London and Athens, then it is suddenly about Boston, Massachusetts: not about the tradition of Europe but the present of America. This precept is a reiteration of the famous complaint from “The American Scholar”: “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe” (70). On the social level, both essays suggest America does not need to look up to Europe anymore; on the level of the individual, both warn against too much veneration for the past. As in Emerson, Grief, and the Annihilation of History 163 “The American Scholar,” in “History” Emerson urges his readers not to be intimidated by the past’s authority and to approach history “actively and not passively” (10). But in “History” he goes even further: he declares that man can “live all history in his own person” (10). Those other people to whom things happened in the past become part of one’s present self. It creates a space apart from time, in which the individual may commune with past thinkers, getting to exist contemporaneously with them. History, therefore, gets sucked into the individual, losing its separateness, its external character. Emerson believes that “All inquiry into antiquity … is the desire to do away this wild, savage and preposterous There or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and the Now.… to abolish difference, and restore unity” (“History” 12). This is an extremely poignant statement: what he dreams of is effectively destroying history by eradicating its otherness, its difference from the present. People of the past can be of any interest only inasmuch as they resemble ourselves - and when they are discovered to do so, “the Here and the Now” may safely replace the “There or Then,” without our paying much attention to whatever may get lost in this substitution. Difference is according to this view only “surface” and “circumstance” - not the essence of history (12-13). This happens through a sort of conflation of the past and the present; history becomes compressed into the present moment through a recognition of the universal level Emerson is interested in: “when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more” (“History” 21). One may notice that such a conception of history has much in common with the Hindu treatment of the material world - and it is not an accidental similarity, since Emerson was fascinated by Eastern philosophy. Just as in Hinduism the world we know is only an illusion, Maya, and a result of the Atman’s play, a universal being masquerading as separate entities, so is history for Emerson only an externalization of the Oversoul, a disguise of the real and ultimate unity of all things. As Frederick Carpenter points out, at the age of eighteen Emerson was already an “orientalist,” having at least some acquaintance with the Far Eastern philosophies, which could account for the similarity described above (“Immortality” 211). However, one may find other sources of Emerson’s treatment of history, and closer to home. Carpenter speaks of the mystical tradition of seeing time and space as unreal, which can clearly be seen in “History” too (Emerson Handbook 185). At the same time, this is another point Emerson has in common with Kant, and his treatment of time and space not as properties of reality but structures imposed by the mind upon experience. Another possible influence, studied in depth by A. Robert Caponigri, is that of Protestantism. In his article “Brownson and Emerson: Nature and History,” Caponigri states that Protestantism’s overarching goal was to rectify history by going back in time to a true and original Christianity. In Justyna Fruzińska 164 order to do that, “the irreversibility of history demands that one have recourse to an ahistorical principle, such as Protestantism did possess in the principle of private judgment” (369). However, the result of applying this “ahistorical principle” was “not to rectify, but to abolish history. Any ahistorical principle so applied must end by ultimately questioning the reality of history” (369). That, for Caponigri, corresponds to the first phase of Protestantism, while the second one “reaches its logical terminus in the assertion that the spiritual life of man is intrinsically independent of history because it is orientated not toward history, but directly toward the absolute spiritual principles of the universe, which are above and beyond history” (369). He believes this orientation towards the absolute is the essence of Emerson’s philosophy too: “American Transcendentalism, viewed in historical perspective, is a moment in this second phase of the historical career of Protestantism,” as its “preoccupation is the reorientation of the spiritual life of man away from history toward absolute principles” (370). It is worth having a closer look at how Caponigri thinks Emerson makes this move away from the historical and towards the absolute. This, according to the critic, happens on three levels: Truth, Good, and Being. On the level of Truth, one directs oneself towards the absolute through intuition, famously valued by Emerson more than its opposite, called by him “tuition” (Caponigri 374). On the level of morality, the turn towards the absolute consists in directing oneself towards “the spiritual laws” which “are transhistorical in their very nature” (374). This means that “In his quest for the Good, [man] must look neither backward nor forward, but above; the spiritual laws directly define and constitute his moral state, so that through them he becomes identical with the absolute moral being of the universe” (375). What Caponigri speaks of is in fact the vertical morality Emerson inherited from Puritan thinkers. We might think for example of the writings of Jonathan Edwards, in which morality applies to the relationship between man and God, not man and his brethren - a way of thinking which will allow Emerson to ask about giving alms to the poor: “Are they my poor? ” (“Self-Reliance” 34). Finally, on the level of Being, Caponigri postulates that Emerson is troubled by the common philosophical belief that history happens through the progression of secondary causes. Instead, the Transcendentalist does away with such an understanding of causality by believing that “Every individual is the object of the causative force of the first cause,” being directly linked to the Absolute (377). What seems evident in Emerson’s writings, however, is more than just a search for the absolute to replace the particular, or the historical. Emerson’s wish to conflate the “There or Then” with the “Here and the Now” results in history becoming incorporated into the present; not merely becoming unimportant or unreal, but “eaten up” by virtue of the same impulse which permeates Emerson’s Nature or “Self-Reliance” with re- Emerson, Grief, and the Annihilation of History 165 gards to the real. It is an impulse of a self that consumes the external world, cannibalizes it. And this is what brings us back to “Experience” and its melancholia - a condition connected in psychoanalysis with cannibalism. As Perez writes, “In both anthropological and psychoanalytic literature, cannibalism is the desire to make what is other same, to annihilate or assimilate the other by incorporation” (10). Both cannibalism and melancholia mean that the outside object is internalized through “pathological hunger” (21). Cannibalism serves as a metaphor for the melancholiac’s “’impossibility’ of mourning, in that the desire to incorporate the other within the self fundamentally destroys its alterity or otherness, while at the same time the ingested other remains elusive even from within the self” (29). This is exactly what may be said to happen to Waldo in “Experience”: as the object of loss, he gets internalized or “entombed” so much that true grief seems impossible. This is also what happens to history in the second essay discussed here, robbed of its status as external to the subject. Let us not be fooled by Emerson’s enthusiastic tone in “History”: viewed from this angle, his celebration of the self which devours the world’s past may be perceived as deeply melancholic. As one may see from the analysis presented above, it is possible to read the relationship between grief and idealism in Emerson’s texts in two, quite different, ways. If we choose to believe Emerson’s declarations in “Experience,” what is troubling about Waldo’s death is the impossibility of interiorizing and truly feeling his loss. Thus, a writer obsessed with the unity of all things discovers that he cannot become one even with himself, looking as if from the outside at his own grief, separate from his own emotion, becoming other to himself. The “innavigable sea” between himself and his feeling, the separateness of his thinking self and his grieving self, is disturbing not only on the human level of a father reflecting upon his mourning over a child, but also on the philosophical one, contradicting the all-encompassing, all-incorporating impulse present in Emerson’s work. On the other hand, following Cavell’s interpretive leap used in his discussion of the confession “I cannot get it nearer to me,” one may say that the problem described in “Experience” is precisely the opposite: it is because of this cannibalizing, incorporating impulse visible among others in “History” that mourning Waldo becomes impossible: the experience is already so “near” that it cannot be brought any nearer since, as in melancholia, the child has been absorbed into the speaking subject - one might say, following Cavell, into the body of the essay itself. Works Cited Caponigri, A. Robert (1945). “Brownson and Emerson: Nature and History.” The New England Quarterly 18.3: 368-390. Carpenter, Frederick I (1953). Emerson Handbook. New York: Hendricks House. Justyna Fruzińska 166 Carpenter, Frederick I (1929). “Immortality from India.” American Literature 1.3: 233-242. Cavell, Stanley (2003). Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes. Stanford: Stanford UP. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1983). “The American Scholar.” Essays and Lectures. New York: The Library of America. 51-72. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1955). “Experience.” Emerson’s Essays. New York: J.M. Dent. 228-252. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1955). “History.” Emerson’s Essays. New York: J.M. Dent. 7-29. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1955). “Self-Reliance.” Emerson’s Essays. New York: J.M. Dent. 29-56. Perez, Emily (2016). Eat Me: Cannibalism and Melancholia. PhD Dissertation U of Southern California. [online] http: / / digitallibrary.usc.edu/ cdm/ ref/ collection/ p15799coll40/ id/ 220535 [2018, Nov 25] White, Ryan (2009). “Neither Here nor There: On Grief and Absence in Emerson’s ‘Experience’” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 23.4: 285-306. Justyna Fruzińska Department of North American Literature and Culture University of Lodz Poland