I am, however, discussing with you troubles which concern us both, and sharing the remedy with you, just as if we were lying ill in the same ward. Listen to me, therefore, as you would if I were talking to myself. I am admitting you to my inmost thoughts, and am having it out with myself, merely making use of you as my pretext.--Seneca, Letter, 27.
I was re-reading Emerson* and trying to figure out why, despite finding regular nuggets of insight and wisdom in his essays, his authorial persona is so grating to me. Take for example, the following paragraph, which is the third one in the opening essay, of his first collection of his Essays:
This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. Emerson (1841) History
Emerson's underlying metaphysical commitments -- as expressed in the first sentence(s) of the essay, "THERE is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same." -- are familiar enough from the Plotinian, Idealistic strain in Spinoza and Leibniz; they are expressed, with a kind of overflowing urgency, which echoes the emanation from the divine, that ought to be appealing. For, unlike those worrying types, who, in the face of One and Unity, despair that any particular individual is ephemeral and fleeting and only perceive the risk of dissolving into the one and only acosmic substance, Deus sive Natura, which has metaphysical umphyness, Emerson grasps that each of us has, thereby, direct access to everything including the whole of history.+
As an aside, for all the aura of elitism that Emerson often displays, this is a truly democratic thought. He expresses it in a lovely image: "all that Shakspeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great prosperities of men;—because there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck, for us, as we ourselves in that place would have done or applauded." Each of us can be a hero and our greatness and heroicism can be expressed in infinite number of ways. (Emerson certainly is capable of taking the thoughts of girls seriously, but it is notable that his favorite image of possibility is boyhood.)
Be that as it may, much of the time this direct access to infinite thought has to be triggered by or mediated through encounters with others. And Emerson's writings are dense with allusions and references not just to the familiar Eurocentric canon of philosophy and religion; he assumes an encyclopedic, universal library in his audience. I find this endearing and his urgent even hectoring call to make our individual experience the touchstone of all we encounter inspiring.
Of course, Emerson understands the risk -- endemic in Whiggish history -- , that all we encounter in our engagements with others is the familiar self; that we become disaster-scene-tourists, who ends up reassured with the familiar contours we see in the mirror each morning. But Emerson's writings call us to new possibilities: every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind.
And this, not the hectoring, is, I sense, the trouble. Emerson is so enthralled by the creative possibilities inherent in us -- the Romantic cult of pre-meditated, divine creativity --, and so right in demanding of us complete, sympathetic identification with those we encounter in history and books "there is properly no history, only biography....every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,—must go over the whole ground," that he does not allow that, quite often, the revolution comes first and that thought plays catch up. By this I do not mean to hurl at Emerson a romantic-fascistic decisionism; rather I merely alert us to the equally familiar experience that so many of our reasons are post hoc interpretations of others and ourselves. (I have been reading Sperber and Mercier's The Enigma of Reason--more about that some other time).
Seneca captures something of this last fact by artfully displaying himself as a vulnerable authorial persona. Like a clever magician he pretends to give away a secret: that he is self-medicating and that, in this vulnerability, he is no better than his audience. Death is necessary for us all, after all. But he also needs his audience, not to receive his gifts, nor to have spectators to his vulnerability, but to occasion, as it were, the articulations that follow the re-cognitions.
*Prompted by writing a paper on him with Andrew Corsa.
+It's a philosophical trick familiar to us who notice that when an austere naturalist effaces the line between science and metaphysics, then greedily embrace metaphysics (of science).
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